“But surely you did not believe such an extravagant tale?  The old man was in his dotage, to begin with.”

Had the old man been in his dotage, which he was not, my answer would have been a more triumphant one.  For when was dotage consistently and imaginatively inventive?  But why should I not believe the story?  There are people who can never believe anything that is not (I do not say merely in accordance with their own character, but) in accordance with the particular mood they may happen to be in at the time it is presented to them.  They know nothing of human nature beyond their own immediate preference at the moment for port or sherry, for vice or virtue.  To tell me there could not be a man so lost to shame, if to rectitude, as Captain Crowfoot, is simply to talk nonsense.  Nay, gentle reader, if you—­and let me suppose I address a lady—­if you will give yourself up for thirty years to doing just whatever your lowest self and not your best self may like, I will warrant you capable, by the end of that time, of child murder at least.  I do not think the descent to Avernus is always easy; but it is always possible.  Many and many such a story was fact in old times; and human nature being the same still, though under different restraints, equally horrible things are constantly in progress towards the windows of the newspapers.

“But the whole tale has such a melodramatic air!”

That argument simply amounts to this:  that, because such subjects are capable of being employed with great dramatic effect, and of being at the same time very badly represented, therefore they cannot take place in real life.  But ask any physician of your acquaintance, whether a story is unlikely simply because it involves terrible things such as do not occur every day.  The fact is, that such things, occurring monthly or yearly only, are more easily hidden away out of sight.  Indeed we can have no sense of security for ourselves except in the knowledge that we are striving up and away, and therefore cannot be sinking nearer to the region of such awful possibilities.

Yet, as I said before, I am afraid I have given it too large a space in my narrative.  Only it so forcibly reminded me at the time of the expression I could not understand upon Miss Oldcastle’s face, and since then has been so often recalled by circumstances and events, that I felt impelled to record it in full.  And now I have done with it.

I left the old man with thanks for the kind reception he had given me, and walked home, revolving many things with which I shall not detain the attention of my reader.  Indeed my thoughts were confused and troubled, and would ill bear analysis or record.  I shut myself up in my study, and tried to read a sermon of Jeremy Taylor.  But it would not do.  I fell fast asleep over it at last, and woke refreshed.

CHAPTER VIII.

What I preached.