that of honour.  Hubert, with no understanding for the craggy facts of life, inwardly rebelled against the whole situation.  He felt that it laid him open to ridicule, the mere suspicion of which always stung him to the quick.  When, therefore, he declared to his mother, in the painful interview on his return to Wanley, that it was almost a relief to him to have lost the inheritance, he spoke with perfect truth.  Amid the tempest which had fallen on his life there rose in that moment the semblance of a star of hope.  The hateful conditions which had weighed upon his future being finally cast off, might he not look forward to some nobler activity than had hitherto seemed possible?  Was he not being saved from his meaner self, that part of his nature which tended to conventional ideals, which was subject to empty pride and ignoble apprehensions?  Had he gone through the storm without companion, hope might have overcome every weakness, but sympathy with his mother’s deep distress troubled his self-control.  At her feet he yielded to the emotions of childhood, and his misery increased until bodily suffering brought him the relief of unconsciousness.

To his mother perhaps he owed that strain of idealism which gave his character its significance.  In Mrs. Eldon it affected only the inner life; in Hubert spiritual strivings naturally sought the outlet of action.  That his emancipation should declare itself in some exaggerated way was quite to be expected:  impatience of futilities and insincerities made common cause with the fiery spirit of youth and spurred him into reckless pursuit of that abiding rapture which is the dream and the despair of the earth’s purest souls.  The pistol bullet checked his course, happily at the right moment.  He had gone far enough for experience and not too far for self-recovery.  The wise man in looking back upon his endeavours regrets nothing of which that can be said.

By the side of a passion such as that which had opened Hubert’s intellectual manhood, the mild, progressive attachments sanctioned by society show so colourless as to suggest illusion.  Thinking of Adela Waltham as he lay recovering from his illness, he found it difficult to distinguish between the feelings associated with her name and those which he had owed to other maidens of the same type.  A week or two at Wanley generally resulted in a conviction that he was in love with Adela; and had Adela been entirely subject to her mother’s influences, had she fallen but a little short of the innocence and delicacy which were her own, whether for happiness or the reverse, she would doubtless have been pledged to Hubert long ere this.  The merest accident had in truth prevented it.  At home for Christmas, the young man had made up his mind to speak and claim her:  he postponed doing so till he should have returned from a visit to a college friend in the same county.  His friend had a sister, five or six years older than Adela, and of a warmer type of beauty, with the finished graces of the town.  Hubert found himself once more without guidance, and so left Wanley behind him, journeying to an unknown land.