To adopt a scheme of religious pretension, with no belief whatever in its being true, merely for sensuous advantage, openly acknowledging to one’s inner self the brazen system of deceit,—­ such a course may, and doubtless has been, trodden, yet surely much less frequently than cynics love to suggest.  But at the juncture which I have now reached in my narrative, I had the advantage of knowing a person who was branded before the whole world, and punished by the law of his country, as a felonious hypocrite.  My Father himself could only sigh and admit the charge.  And yet—­I doubt.

About half-way between our village and the town there lay a comfortable villa inhabited by a retired solicitor, or perhaps attorney, whom I shall name Mr. Dormant.  We often called at his half-way house, and, although he was a member of the town-meeting, he not unfrequently came up to us for ’the breaking of bread’.  Mr. Dormant was a solid, pink man, of a cosy habit.  He had beautiful white hair, a very soft voice, and a welcoming, wheedling manner; he was extremely fluent and zealous in using the pious phraseology of the sect.  My Father had never been very much attracted to him, but the man professed, and I think felt, an overwhelming admiration for my Father.  Mr. Dormant was not very well off, and in the previous year he had persuaded an aged gentleman of wealth to come and board with him.  When, in the course of the winter, this gentleman died, much surprise was felt at the report that he had left almost his entire fortune, which was not inconsiderable, to Mr. Dormant.

Much surprise—­for the old gentleman had a son to whom he had always been warmly attached, who was far away, I think in South America, practising a perfectly respectable profession of which his father entirely approved.  My own Father always preserved a delicacy and a sense of honour about money which could not have been more sensitive if he had been an ungodly man, and I am very much pleased to remember that when the legacy was first spoken of, he regretted that Mr. Dormant should have allowed the old gentleman to make this will.  If he knew the intention, my Father said, it would have shown a more proper sense of his responsibility if he had dissuaded the testator from so unbecoming a disposition.  That was long before any legal question arose; and now Mr. Dormant came into his fortune, and began to make handsome gifts to missionary societies, and to his own meeting in the town.  If I do not mistake, he gave, unsolicited, a sum to our building fund, which my Father afterwards returned.  But in process of time we heard that the son had come back from the Antipodes, and was making investigations.  Before we knew where we were, the news burst upon us, like a bomb-shell, that Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal charge and was now in jail at Exeter.