“I will.  You are a true friend.  You will look in and see us, of course, market-day?”

“Why not?”

Meadows did not resume his visits at Grassmere without some twinges of conscience and a prudent resolve not to anchor his happiness upon Susan Merton.  “That man might come here any day with his thousand pounds and take her from me,” said he.  “He seems by his letters to be doing well, and they say any fool can make money in the colonies.  Well, if he comes home respectable and well to do—­I’ll go out.  If I am not to have the only woman I ever loved or cared for, let thousands and thousands of miles of sea lie between me and that pair.”  But still he wheeled about the flame.

Ere long matters took a very different turn.  The tone of George’s letters began to change.  His repeated losses of bullocks and sheep were all recorded in his letters to Susan, and these letters were all read with eager anxiety by Meadows a day before they reached Grassmere.

The respectable man did not commit this action without some iron passing through his own soul—­Nemo repente turpissimus. The first letter he opened it was like picking a lock.  He writhed and blushed, and his uncertain fingers fumbled with another’s property as if it had been red-hot.  The next cost him some shame, too, but the next less, and soon these little spasms of conscience began to be lost in the pleasure the letters gave him.  “It is clear he will never make a thousand pounds out there, and if he doesn’t the old farmer won’t give him Susan.  Won’t?  He shan’t!  He shall be too deep in my debt to venture on it even if he was minded.”  Meadows exulted over the letters; and as he exulted they stabbed him, for by the side of the records of his ill fortune the exile never failed to pour out his love and confidence in his Susan and to acknowledge the receipt of some dear letter from her, which Meadows could see by George’s must have assured him of undiminished or even increased affection.

Thus did sin lead to sin.  By breaking a seal which was not his and reading letters which were not his, Meadows filled himself with the warmest hopes of possessing Susan one day, and got to hate George for the stabs the young man innocently gave him.  At last he actually looked on George as a sort of dog in the manger, who could not make Susan happy, yet would come between her heart and one who could.  All weapons seemed lawful against such a mere pest as this—­a dog in the manger.

Meadows started with nothing better nor worse than a commonplace conscience.  A vicious habit is an iron that soon sears that sort of article.  When he had opened and read about four letters, his moral nature turned stone-blind of one eye.  And now he was happier (on the surface) than he had been ever since he fell in love with Susan.