 probably
considered that you had some business to transact with me. But under the
circumstances I will invite you to remain here for the night, and I will myself
ride over here early to-morrow morning - before breakfast, in fact, when I can
receive any communication you have to make to me.«
    »With all my heart,« said Raffles; »this is a comfortable place - a little
dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night, with this good
liquor and the prospect of seeing you again in the morning. You're a much better
host than my stepson was; but Josh owed me a bit of a grudge for marrying his
mother; and between you and me there was never anything but kindness.«
    Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and sneering in
Raffles' manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had determined to wait till
he was quite sober before he spent more words upon him. But he rode home with a
terribly lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging any result
that could be permanently counted on with this man. It was inevitable that he
should wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be
regarded as lying outside the divine plan. The spirit of evil might have sent
him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument of good; but the
threat must have been permitted, and was a chastisement of a new kind. It was an
hour of anguish for him very different from the hours in which his struggle had
been securely private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds
were pardoned and his services accepted. Those misdeeds even when committed -
had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his desire to devote
himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divine scheme? And was he
after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a rock of offence? For who
would understand the work within him? Who would not, when there was the pretext
of casting disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had
espoused, in one heap of obloquy?
    In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's mind clad
his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman ends. But even
while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and the solar
system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the
changing day. And now within all the automatic succession of theoretic phrases -
distinct and inmost as the
