My immediate reflections hit on the Bible lessons Edbury must have had to swallow, and the gaping of the waters when its truths were suddenly and tremendously brought home to him.

An odd series of accidents!  I thought.

Temple continued:  ’Heriot held his tongue about it next morning.  He was one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn’t go.  He said something to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.’

‘How betrayed him?’ said I.

‘Why,’ said Temple, ’of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi’s hands.  Edbury wouldn’t have known of Mabel’s sailing, or known the vessel she was in, without her help.  She led him down to the water and posted him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh’s; and when you and Captain Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla.  Old Heriot is not responsible for the consequences.  What he supposed was likely enough.  He thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair, and thought, I suppose, that if Edbury saw her he’d find he couldn’t leave her, and old Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her plumes for nothing at the altar.  And so she did:  and a pretty scene it was.  She snatched at the minutes as they slipped past twelve like fishes, and snarled at the parson, and would have kept him standing till one P.M., if Janet had not turned on her heel.  The old woman got in front of her to block her way.  “Ah, Temple,” she said to me, “it would be hard if I could not think I had done all that was due to them.”  I didn’t see her again till she was starting for Germany.  And, Richie, she thinks you can never forgive her.  She wrote me word that the princess is of another mind, but her own opinion, she says, is based upon knowing you.’

‘Good heaven! how little!’ cried I.

Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet’s behalf for my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of pride and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread my unforgivingness.  Yet he and Janet had known me longest.  Supposing that my idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that I thought of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been through the previous years?  Did I judge by the flower, and they by root and stem?  But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off:  it may be a different development next year.  Did they not therefore judge me soundly?

Ottilia was the keenest reader.  Ottilia had divined what could be wrought out of me.  I was still subject to the relapses of a not perfectly right nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought of ’An odd series of accidents!’ which was but a disguised fashion of attributing to Providence the particular concern, in my fortunes:  an impiety and a folly!  This is the temptation of those who are rescued and made happy by circumstances.  The wretched think themselves spited, and are merely childish, not egregious in egoism.  Thither on leads to a chapter—­already written by the wise, doubtless.  It does not become an atom of humanity to dwell on it beyond a point where students of the human condition may see him passing through the experiences of the flesh and the brain.