I left him at Bulsted on my way to London to face the creditors.  Adversity had not lowered the admiration of the captain and his wife for the magnificent host of those select and lofty entertainments which I was led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder as big as theirs, but of another complexion:  They hung about him, and perused and petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him deeply injured:  by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was disappointed in me for refraining to come out with a sally on his behalf.  He had quite intoxicated their imaginations.  Julia told me of the things he did not do as marvellingly as of the things he did or had done; the charm, it seemed, was to find herself familiar with him to the extent of all but nursing him and making him belong to her.  Pilgrims coming upon the source of the mysteriously-abounding river, hardly revere it the less because they love it more when they behold the babbling channels it issues from; and the sense of possession is the secret, I suppose.  Julia could inform me rapturously that her charge had slept eighteen hours at a spell.  His remarks upon the proposal to fetch a doctor, feeble in themselves, were delicious to her, because they recalled his old humour to show his great spirit, and from her and from Captain William in turn I was condemned to hear how he had said this and that of the doctor, which in my opinion might have been more concise.  ‘Really, deuced good indeed!’ Captain William would exclaim.  ’Don’t you see it, Harry, my boy?  He denies the doctor has a right to cast him out of the world on account of his having been the official to introduce him, and he’ll only consent to be visited when he happens to be as incapable of resisting as upon their very first encounter.’

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father’s merits.  Fond as they were of the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of her good deed:  my father was the victim.  Their unabated warmth consoled me in the bitterest of seasons.  He found a home with them at a time when there would have been a battle at every step.  The world soon knew that my grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the entire fabric of the Grand Parade fell to the ground at once.  The crash was heavy.  Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity is to see ‘faces’; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in their curious observation of you under misfortune.  You see neither friends nor enemies.  You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted against enemies.  You see but the mask of faces:  my father was sheltered from that.  Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to catch his whims, and treated them