’Of course;—­and I am obliged to you.  But, Lady Lufton, you do not understand yet how this hits me.  Everything in life that I have done, I have done for my children.  I am wealthy, but I have not used my wealth for myself, because I have desired that they should be able to hold their heads high in the world.  All my ambition has been for them, and all the pleasure which I have anticipated for myself in my old age is that which I have hoped to receive from their credit.  As for Henry, he might have had anything he wanted from me in the way of money.  He expressed a wish, a few months since, to go into Parliament, and I promised to help him as far as ever I could go.  I have kept up the game altogether for him.  He, the younger son of a working parish parson, has had everything that could be given to the eldest son of a country gentleman—­more than is given to the eldest son of many a peer.  I have hoped that he would marry again, but I have never cared that he should marry for money.  I have been willing to do anything for him myself.  But, Lady Lufton, a father does feel that he should have some return for all this.  No one can imagine that Henry ever supposed that a bride from that wretched place at Hogglestock could be welcomed among us.  He knew that he would break our hearts, and he did not care for it.  That is what I feel.  Of course he has the power to do as he likes;—­and of course I have the power to do as I like also with what is my own.’

Lady Lufton was a very good woman, devoted to her duties, affectionate and just to those about her, truly religious, and charitable from her nature; but I doubt whether the thorough worldliness of the archdeacon’s appeal struck her as it will strike the reader.  People are so much more worldly in practice than they are in theory, so much keener after their own gratification in detail than they are in the abstract, that the narrative of many an adventure would shock us, though the same adventure would not shock us in the action.  One girl tells another how she has changed her mind in love; and the friend sympathises with the friend, and perhaps applauds.  Had the story been told in print, the friend who had listened with equanimity would have read of such vacillation with indignation.  She who vacillated herself would have hated her own performance when brought before her judgment as a matter in which she had no personal interest.  Very fine things are written every day about honesty and truth, and men read them with a sort of external conviction that a man, if he be anything of a man at all, is of course honest and true.  But when the internal convictions are brought out between two or three who are personally interested together—­between two or three who feel that their little gathering is, so to say, ’tiled’—­those internal convictions differ very much from the external convictions.  This man, in his confidences, asserts broadly that he does not mean to be thrown over, and that man has a project for throwing over somebody else; and the intention of each is that scruples are not to stand in the way of his success.  The ‘Ruat coelum, fiat justitia’ was said, no doubt, from an outside balcony to a crowd, and the speaker knew that he was talking buncombe.  The ‘Rem, si possis recte, si non quocunque modo’ was whispered into the ear in a club smoking-room, and the whisperer intended that his words should prevail.