by some adroit technical management. Nobody off the stage could be
sentimental about these things, or pretend to shed tears of joy because an
estate was handed over from a gentleman to a mendicant sailor with a wooden leg.
And this chance remainder-man was perhaps some such specimen of inheritance as
the drunken fellow killed in the riot. All the world would think the actual
Transomes in the right to contest any adverse claim to the utmost. But then - it
was not certain that they would win in the contest; and not winning, they would
incur other loss besides that of the estate. There had been a little too much of
such loss already.
    But why, if it were not wrong to contest the claim, should he feel the most
uncomfortable scruples about robbing the claim of its sting by getting rid of
its evidence? It was a mortal disappointment - it was a sacrifice of
indemnification - to abstain from punishing Jermyn. But even if he brought his
mind to contemplate that as the wiser course, he still shrank from what looked
like complicity with Jermyn; he still shrank from the secret nullification of a
just legal claim. If he had only known the details, if he had known who this
alleged heir was, he might have seen his way to some course that would not have
grated on his sense of honour and dignity. But Jermyn had been too acute to let
Harold know this: he had even carefully kept to the masculine pronoun. And he
believed that there was no one besides himself who would or could make Harold
any wiser. He went home persuaded that between this interview and the next which
they would have together, Harold would be left to an inward debate, founded
entirely on the information he himself had given. And he had not much doubt that
the result would be what he desired. Harold was no fool: there were many good
things he liked better in life than an irrational vindictiveness.
    And it did happen that, after writing to London in fulfilment of his pledge,
Harold spent many hours over that inward debate, which was not very different
from what Jermyn imagined. He took it everywhere with him, on foot and on
horseback, and it was his companion through a great deal of the night. His
nature was not of a kind given to internal conflict, and he had never before
been long undecided and puzzled. This unaccustomed state of mind was so
painfully irksome to him - he rebelled so impatiently against the oppression of
circumstances in which his quick temperament and habitual decision could not
help him - that it added tenfold to his hatred of Jermyn, who was