Did he feel any remorse when he was plotting the betrayal of Arnold in the garden at Windygates?  The sense which feels remorse had not been put into him.  What he is now is the legitimate consequence of what he was then.  A far more serious temptation is now urging him to commit a far more serious crime.  How is he to resist?  Will his skill in rowing (as Sir Patrick once put it), his swiftness in running, his admirable capacity and endurance in other physical exercises, help him to win a purely moral victory over his own selfishness and his own cruelty?  No!  The moral and mental neglect of himself, which the material tone of public feeling about him has tacitly encouraged, has left him at the mercy of the worst instincts in his nature—­of all that is most vile and of all that is most dangerous in the composition of the natural man.  With the mass of his fellows, no harm out of the common has come of this, because no temptation out of the common has passed their way.  But with him, the case is reversed.  A temptation out of the common has passed his way.  How does it find him prepared to meet it?  It finds him, literally and exactly, what his training has left him, in the presence of any temptation small or great—­a defenseless man.

Geoffrey returned to the cottage.  The servant stopped him in the passage, to ask at what time he wished to dine.  Instead of answering, he inquired angrily for Mrs. Dethridge.  Mrs. Dethridge not come back.

It was now late in the afternoon, and she had been out since the early morning.  This had never happened before.  Vague suspicions of her, one more monstrous than another, began to rise in Geoffrey’s mind.  Between the drink and the fever, he had been (as Julius had told him) wandering in his mind during a part of the night.  Had he let any thing out in that condition?  Had Hester heard it?  And was it, by any chance, at the bottom of her long absence and her notice to quit?  He determined—­without letting her see that he suspected her—­to clear up that doubt as soon as his landlady returned to the house.

The evening came.  It was past nine o’clock before there was a ring at the bell.  The servant came to ask for the key.  Geoffrey rose to go to the gate himself—­and changed his mind before he left the room. Her suspicions might be roused (supposing it to be Hester who was waiting for admission) if he opened the gate to her when the servant was there to do it.  He gave the girl the key, and kept out of sight.

* * * * *

“Dead tired!”—­the servant said to herself, seeing her mistress by the light of the lamp over the gate.

“Dead tired!”—­Geoffrey said to himself, observing Hester suspiciously as she passed him in the passage on her way up stairs to take off her bonnet in her own room.

“Dead tired!”—­Anne said to herself, meeting Hester on the upper floor, and receiving from her a letter in Blanche’s handwriting, delivered to the mistress of the cottage by the postman, who had met her at her own gate.