“Do as you would at home. I shall send word to Will Somers that you and I sup there to-morrow. You forgive me for letting out your secret. All straightforward now and henceforth. You come to their hearth as a friend, who will grow dearer to them both every year. Ah, Tom, this love for woman seems to me a very wonderful thing. It may sink a man into such deeps of evil, and lift a man into such heights of good.”
“I don’t know as to the good,” said Tom, mournfully, and laying aside his cigar.
“Go on smoking: I should like to keep you company; can you spare me one of your cigars?”
Tom offered his case. Kenelm extracted a cigar, lighted it, drew a few whiffs, and, when he saw that Tom had resumed his own cigar, recommenced conversation.
“You don’t know as to the good; but tell me honestly, do you think if you had not loved Jessie Wiles, you would be as good a man as you are now?”
“If I am better than I was, it is not because of my love for the girl.”
“What then?”
“The loss of her.”
Kenelm started, turned very pale, threw aside the cigar, rose, and walked the room to and fro with very quick but very irregular strides.
Tom continued quietly. “Suppose I had won Jessie and married her, I don’t think any idea of improving myself would have entered my head. My uncle would have been very much offended at my marrying a day-labourer’s daughter, and would not have invited me to Luscombe. I should have remained at Graveleigh, with no ambition of being more than a common farrier, an ignorant, noisy, quarrelsome man; and if I could not have made Jessie as fond of me as I wished, I should not have broken myself of drinking, and I shudder to think what a brute I might have been, when I see in the newspapers an account of some drunken wife-beater. How do we know but what that wife-beater loved his wife dearly before marriage, and she did not care for him? His home was unhappy, and so he took to drink and to wife-beating.”