“Well, sir—­I am not the Almighty to read folk’s hearts—­least of all such a one as yours—­but if I have done you wrong I ask your pardon.  Come, sir, if you don’t mean to undermine my brother with the girl you can give me your hand, and I can give you mine—­and there ’tis.”

Meadows wished this young man away, and seeing that the best way to get rid of him was to give him his hand, he turned round, and, scarcely looking toward him, gave him his hand.  William shook it and went away with something that sounded like a sigh.  Meadows saw him out, and locked the door impatiently; then he flung himself into a chair and laid his beating temples on the cold table; then he started up and walked wildly to and fro the room.  The man was torn this way and that with rage, love and remorse.

“What shall I do?” thus ran his thoughts.  “That angel is my only refuge, and yet to win her I shall have to walk through dirt and shame and every sin that is.  I see crimes ahead; such a heap of crimes, my flesh creeps at the number of them.  Why not be like her, why not be the greatest saint that ever lived, instead of one more villain added to so many?  Let me tear this terrible love out of my heart and die.  Oh! if some one would but take me by the scurf of the neck and drag me to some other country a million miles away, where I might never see my tempter again till this madness is out of me.  Susan, you are an angel, but you will plunge me to hell.”

Now it happened while he was thus raving and suffering the preliminary pangs of wrong-doing that his old servant knocked at the outside of the door and thrust a letter through the trap; the letter was from a country gentleman, one Mr. Chester, for whom be had done business.  Mr. Chester wrote from Lancashire.  He informed Meadows he had succeeded to a very large property in that county—­it had been shockingly mismanaged by his predecessor; he wanted a capable man’s advice, and moreover all the estates thereabouts were compelled to be surveyed and valued this year, which he deplored, but since so it was he would be surveyed and valued by none but John Meadows.

“Come by return of post,” added this hasty squire, “and I’ll introduce you to half the landed proprietors in this county.”

Meadows read this and seizing a pen wrote thus: 

“DEAR SIR—­Yours received this day at 1 p.m., and will start for your house at 6 P.M.”

He threw himself on his horse and rode to his mother’s house.  “Mother, I am turned out of my house.”

“Why, John, you don’t say so?”

“I must go into the new house I have built outside the town.”

“What, the one you thought to let to Mr. James?”

“The same.  I have got only a fortnight to move all my things.  Will you do me a kindness now, will you see them put into the new house?”

“Me, John! why I should be afraid something would go wrong.”

“Well, it isn’t fair of me to put this trouble on you at your age; but read this letter—­there is fifteen hundred pounds waiting for me in the North.”