"
"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.
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