He hesitated, and his words when they came halted somewhat, but his meaning was evident.

“I’m glad you’m back to home.  I’ll forget all what’s gone, if you will.  ‘Twas give an’ take, I s’pose.  I took my awn anyway, an’ you comed near killing me for’t, so we’m upsides now, eh?  We’m men o’ the world likewise.  So—­so shall us shake hands an’ let bygones be, Jan Grimbal?”

He half raised his hand, and looked up, with a smile at the corner of his lip ready to jump into life if the rider should accept his friendship.  But Grimbal’s response was otherwise.

To say little goodness dwelt in this man had been untrue, but recent events and the first shattering reverse that life brought him proved sufficient to sour his very soul and eclipse a sun which aforetime shone with great geniality because unclouded.  Fate hits such men particularly hard when her delayed blow falls.  Existences long attuned to success and level fortune; lives which have passed through five-and-thirty years of their allotted span without much sorrow, without sharp thorns in the flesh, without those carking, gnawing trials of mind and body which Time stores up for all humanity—­such feel disaster when it does reach them with a bitterness unknown by those who have been in misery’s school from youth.  Poverty does not bite the poor as it bites him who has known riches and afterwards fights destitution; feeble physical circumstances do not crush the congenital invalid, but they often come near to break the heart of a man who, until their black advent, has known nothing but rude health; great reverses in the vital issues of life and fortune fail to obliterate one who knows their faces of old, but the first enemy’s cannon on Time’s road must ever bring ugly shock to him who has advanced far and happily without meeting any such thing.

Grimbal’s existence had been of a rough-and-ready sort shone over by success.  Philosophy he lacked, for life had never turned his mind that way; religion was likewise absent from him; and his recent tremendous disappointment thus thundered upon a mind devoid of any machinery to resist it.  The possession of Phoebe Lyddon had come to be an accepted and accomplished fact; he chose her for his own, to share the good things Fortune had showered into his lap—­to share them and be a crowning glory of them.  The overthrow of this scheme at the moment of realisation upset his estimate of life in general and set him adrift and rudderless, in the hurricane of his first great reverse.  Of selfish temperament, and doubly so by the accident of consistent success, the wintry wind of this calamity slew and then swept John Grimbal’s common sense before it, like a dead leaf.  All that was worst in him rose to the top upon his trouble, and since Will’s marriage the bad had been winning on the good and thrusting it deeper and deeper out of sight or immediate possibility of recovery.  At all times John Grimbal’s inferior characteristics