If it went ill before with the hours devoted to common labour, it went worse now.  Hugh seized every gap of time, and widened its margins shamefully, in order to work at his translation.  He found it very difficult to render the Italian in classical and poetic English.  The three rhyming words, and the mode in which the stanzas are looped together, added greatly to the difficulty.  Blank verse he would have found quite easy compared to this.  But he would not blench.  The thought of her praise, and of the yet better favour he might gain, spurred him on; and Harry was the sacrifice.  But he would make it all up to him, when this was once over.  Indeed, he would.

Thus he baked cakes of clay to choke the barking of Cerberian conscience.  But it would growl notwithstanding.

The boy’s spirit was sinking; but Hugh did not or would not see it.  His step grew less elastic.  He became more listless, more like his former self —­ sauntering about with his hands in his pockets.  And Hugh, of course, found himself caring less about him; for the thought of him, rousing as it did the sense of his own neglect, had become troublesome.  Sometimes he even passed poor Harry without speaking to him.

Gradually, however, he grew still further into the favour of Mr. Arnold, until he seemed to have even acquired some influence with him.  Mr. Arnold would go out riding with them himself sometimes, and express great satisfaction, not only with the way Harry sat his pony, for which he accorded Hugh the credit due to him, but with the way in which Hugh managed his own horse as well.  Mr. Arnold was a good horseman, and his praise was especially grateful to Hugh, because Euphra was always near, and always heard it.  I fear, however, that his progress in the good graces of Mr. Arnold, was, in a considerable degree, the result of the greater anxiety to please, which sprung from the consciousness of not deserving approbation.  Pleasing was an easy substitute for well-doing.  Not acceptable to himself, he had the greater desire to be acceptable to others; and so reflect the side-beams of a false approbation on himself —­ who needed true light and would be ill-provided for with any substitute.  For a man who is received as a millionaire can hardly help feeling like one at times, even if he knows he has overdrawn his banker’s account.  The necessity to Hugh’s nature of feeling right, drove him to this false mode of producing the false impression.  If one only wants to feel virtuous, there are several royal roads to that end.  But, fortunately, the end itself would be unsatisfactory if gained; while not one of these roads does more than pretend to lead even to that land of delusion.

The reaction in Hugh’s mind was sometimes torturing enough.  But he had not strength to resist Euphra, and so reform.

Well or ill done, at length his translation was finished.  So was Euphra’s.  They exchanged papers for a private reading first; and arranged to meet afterwards, in order to compare criticisms.