How does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the truer and better of the two?  When Felix attempts to interfere in the conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong.  He buys Christian’s secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables, if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has been the great object of his desires and efforts.  By simply allowing the trial and sentence of Felix to take their course, he would, to all appearance, strengthen the possibility that by marriage to Esther his position shall be maintained, with the further joy of having that “white new-winged dove” thenceforth by his side.  He comes forward as witness on behalf of Felix, and gives his evidence fairly, truly, and in such guise as makes it tell most favourably for the accused, and at the same time against himself; and, last and most touching of all, it is after he knows the full depth of the humiliation in which his mother’s sin has for life involved him, that his first exhibition of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence towards that poor stricken heart and blighted life comes forth.  How comes it that this “well-tanned man of the world” thus always chooses the higher and more difficult right; and does this in no excitement or enthusiasm, but coolly, calculatingly, with clear forecasting of all the consequences, and fairly entitled to assume that these shall be to his own peril or detriment?

We cannot assign this seeming anomaly to that undefinable something called the instinct of the gentleman, {29} so specially recognised in the elder and younger Debarry, as a reality and power in life.  To say nothing of the fact that this instinct deals primarily with questions of feeling, and only indirectly and incidentally with questions of moral right, Harold Transome, alike congenitally and circumstantially, could scarcely by possibility have been animated by it even in slight degree, nor does it ever betray its presence in him through those slight but graceful courtesies of life which are pre-eminently the sphere of its manifestation.  Equally untenable is the hypothesis which ascribes these manifestations of character wholly to the influence of a nature higher than his own appealing to him—­that of Felix Holt, the glorious old Dissenter, or Esther Lyon.  Such appeals can have any avail only when in the nature appealed to there remains the capability to recognise that right is greater than success or joy, and the moral power of will to act on that recognition.  In the fact that Harold’s nature does respond to these appeals we have the clue to the apparent anomaly his character presents.  We see that, howsoever overlaid by temperament and restrained by circumstance, the noblest capability in man still survives and is active in him.  He can choose the