But now he could not help saying to himself that the heaviest part of his burden was removed, and that even before the end of another year his circumstances might be brought into a shape that would allow him to think of marrying.  It would always be a hard struggle with his mother, he knew:  she would be jealous of any wife he might choose, and she had set her mind especially against Hetty—­perhaps for no other reason than that she suspected Hetty to be the woman he had chosen.  It would never do, he feared, for his mother to live in the same house with him when he was married; and yet how hard she would think it if he asked her to leave him!  Yes, there was a great deal of pain to be gone through with his mother, but it was a case in which he must make her feel that his will was strong—­it would be better for her in the end.  For himself, he would have liked that they should all live together till Seth was married, and they might have built a bit themselves to the old house, and made more room.  He did not like “to part wi’ th’ lad”:  they had hardly every been separated for more than a day since they were born.

But Adam had no sooner caught his imagination leaping forward in this way—­making arrangements for an uncertain future—­than he checked himself.  “A pretty building I’m making, without either bricks or timber.  I’m up i’ the garret a’ready, and haven’t so much as dug the foundation.”  Whenever Adam was strongly convinced of any proposition, it took the form of a principle in his mind:  it was knowledge to be acted on, as much as the knowledge that damp will cause rust.  Perhaps here lay the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of:  he had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences.  Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey?  And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it—­by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward suffering.  That is a long and hard lesson, and Adam had at present only learned the alphabet of it in his father’s sudden death, which, by annihilating in an instant all that had stimulated his indignation, had sent a sudden rush of thought and memory over what had claimed his pity and tenderness.

But it was Adam’s strength, not its correlative hardness, that influenced his meditations this morning.  He had long made up his mind that it would be wrong as well as foolish for him to marry a blooming young girl, so long as he had no other prospect than that of growing poverty with a growing family.  And his savings had been so constantly drawn upon (besides the terrible sweep of paying for Seth’s substitute in the militia) that he had not enough money beforehand to furnish even a small cottage, and keep something