“That’s needless,” said Caleb, waving his hand, bowing his head slightly, and not swerving from the tone which had in it the merciful intention to spare this pitiable man.  “What he has said to me will never pass from my lips, unless something now unknown forces it from me.  If you led a harmful life for gain, and kept others out of their rights by deceit, to get the more for yourself, I dare say you repent—­ you would like to go back, and can’t:  that must be a bitter thing”—­ Caleb paused a moment and shook his head—­“it is not for me to make your life harder to you.”

“But you do—­you do make it harder to me,” said Bulstrode constrained into a genuine, pleading cry.  “You make it harder to me by turning your back on me.”

“That I’m forced to do,” said Caleb, still more gently, lifting up his hand.  “I am sorry.  I don’t judge you and say, he is wicked, and I am righteous.  God forbid.  I don’t know everything.  A man may do wrong, and his will may rise clear out of it, though he can’t get his life clear.  That’s a bad punishment.  If it is so with you,—­ well, I’m very sorry for you.  But I have that feeling inside me, that I can’t go on working with you.  That’s all, Mr. Bulstrode.  Everything else is buried, so far as my will goes.  And I wish you good-day.”

“One moment, Mr. Garth!” said Bulstrode, hurriedly.  “I may trust then to your solemn assurance that you will not repeat either to man or woman what—­even if it have any degree of truth in it—­ is yet a malicious representation?” Caleb’s wrath was stirred, and he said, indignantly—­

“Why should I have said it if I didn’t mean it?  I am in no fear of you.  Such tales as that will never tempt my tongue.”

“Excuse me—­I am agitated—­I am the victim of this abandoned man.”

“Stop a bit! you have got to consider whether you didn’t help to make him worse, when you profited by his vices.”

“You are wronging me by too readily believing him,” said Bulstrode, oppressed, as by a nightmare, with the inability to deny flatly what Raffles might have said; and yet feeling it an escape that Caleb had not so stated it to him as to ask for that flat denial.

“No,” said Caleb, lifting his hand deprecatingly; “I am ready to believe better, when better is proved.  I rob you of no good chance.  As to speaking, I hold it a crime to expose a man’s sin unless I’m clear it must be done to save the innocent.  That is my way of thinking, Mr. Bulstrode, and what I say, I’ve no need to swear.  I wish you good-day.”

Some hours later, when he was at home, Caleb said to his wife, incidentally, that he had had some little differences with Bulstrode, and that in consequence, he had given up all notion of taking Stone Court, and indeed had resigned doing further business for him.

“He was disposed to interfere too much, was he?” said Mrs. Garth, imagining that her husband had been touched on his sensitive point, and not been allowed to do what he thought right as to materials and modes of work.