Never is man so inflamed with anger, so overflowing with gall against others, as when he is conscious that he has laid himself open to animadversions. Anthony was bitter at heart against his wife and against her uncle, because he was aware, without being ready to acknowledge it, that he had acted ill towards both.

Why should not Urith have yielded at once to his wishes about the cradle? How obtuse to all delicate and elevated feeling she was to think that such a dusty, dingy, worm-eaten crib would suffice for his son, the representative of the house of Cleverdon—the child who was to be the means of reconciliation between himself and his father—the heir of Hall, who would open to him again the internal mansion, and enable him to return there and escape from Willsworthy, a place becoming daily more distasteful, and likely to become wholly insupportable! That he had seen the cradle under disadvantage, in its abandoned, forgotten condition, and that it could be made to look well when a little feminine skill and taste had been expended on it, did not occur to him.

Moreover, his wife had no right to resist his wishes. He knew the world better than she—he knew what befitted one of the station his child would assume better than she. What might do for an heir to Willsworthy would be indecent for the heir to Hall—what might have suited a girl was not adapted to a boy. A wife should not question, but submit; the wish of her husband ought to be paramount to her, and she should understand that her husband in requiring a thing acted on his right as master, and that her place was to bow to his requisition. The old sore against his father that had partially skinned over broke out again, festered and hot. He was angry against his father, as he was against Urith. He was angry also with Mr. Gibbs for having proved a better man than himself at single-stick. Of old, Anthony had shown himself a tolerable wrestler, runner, single-stick player, thrower of quoits, player at bowls, among the young men of his acquaintance, and he had supposed himself a match for any one. Now he was easily disarmed and defeated by a half-tipsy old loafer, who had done no good to himself or any one in his life.

He had gone down in public estimation since his marriage—he who had been cock of the walk. And now he was not even esteemed in his own house; resisted by his wife, who set at naught his wishes, played with and beaten by that sot—her uncle.

There was no one who really admired and looked up to him any longer, except Julian Crymes.

He had wandered forth in the wet, without a purpose, solely with the desire to be away from the house where he had met with annoyance, where he had played—but this he would not admit, though he felt it—so poor a figure. He took his way to Peter Tavy, and went into the little inn of the Hare and Hounds at Cudliptown, the first hamlet he reached.

No one was there. Uncle Sol had sat there, and tippled and smoked; but had finally wearied of the solitariness, and had gone away. Now Anthony sat down where he had been, and was glad to find no one there, for in his present humour he was disinclined for company. The landlord came to him and took his order for aqua vitÆ, brought it, and seated himself on a stool near him. But Anthony would not speak, or only answered his questions shortly, so as to let the man understand that his society was not desired. He took the hint, rose, and left the young man to his own thoughts.

Anthony put his head in his hand, and looked sullenly at the table. Many thoughts troubled him. Here he had sat on that eventful night after his first meeting and association with Urith on the moor. Here he had sat, with his heart on fire from her eyes, smouldering with love—just as an optic-glass kindles tinder. Here he had drunk, and, to show his courage, had gone forth to the churchyard and had broken down her father's head-post. He had brought it to this house, thrown it on this table—there! he doubted not, was the dint made by it when it struck the board.

How long was it since that night? Only a little over a twelve-month. Did Urith's eyes burn his heart now? There was a fire in them occasionally, but it did not make his heart flame with love, but with anger. Formerly he was the well-to-do Anthony Cleverdon, of Hall, with money in his pockets, able to take his pleasure, whatever it cost him. Now he had to reckon whether he could afford a glass before he treated himself to one, was warned against purchasing a new cradle as a needless expense, a bit of unpardonable extravagance.

He tossed off his glass, and signed for it to be refilled.

Then he thought of his father, of his rebellion against him, and he asked whether any good had come to him by that revolt. He, himself, was like to be a father shortly. Would his son ever set him at defiance, as he had defied his father? He wondered what his father was thinking of him; whether he knew how straitened his circumstances were, how clouded his happiness was, how he regretted the unretraceable step he had taken, how he was weary of Willsworthy, and how he hungered to hear of and to see Hall once more. There was little real conscious love of his father in his heart. He did not regret the breach for his father's sake, think of the desolation of the old man, with his broken hopes, his disappointed ambitions; he saw things only as they affected himself; he was himself the pivot about which all his meditations turned, and he condoled with, lamented over, himself as the worst-used of men, the man most buffeted by misfortune.

Anthony kicked the legs of the table impatiently. The host looked at him and smirked. He had his own opinion as to how matters stood with Anthony. He knew well enough that the young man was unlike Mr. Gibbs, was no toper; he had rarely stepped within his doors since his marriage. As the host observed him, he chuckled to himself and said, "That fellow will come often here now. He has a worm at the heart, and that worm only ceases to gnaw when given aqua vitÆ or punch."

What if the old Squire were to remain obdurate to the end? What if he did not yield to the glad news that he was grandfather to a new Anthony Cleverdon? Anthony's heart turned sick at the thought. His son to be condemned to a toilful life at Willsworthy! But what if Urith should at some future time be given a daughter, then her estate would pass away from the young Anthony, and the representative of the Cleverdons would be adrift in the land without an acre, with hardly a coin—and Hall would be held by an alien.

He stamped with rage.

His father was possessed with madness; the whole blame fell on his father. Why was the old grudge against Richard Malvine to envenom the life of the son and grandchildren of the Squire? By the course he took the Squire was not hurting the man whom he hated, who was in his grave and insensible to injury, but his own living direct descendants! Anthony was stabbing at his own family, in his insensate malice. He thought over his quarrel with the old man, and he regretted that he had not spoken plainer, given his father sharper thrusts than he had—that he had not dipped his words in pitch, and thrown them blazing into his father's face.

His cheeks were burning; he clenched his fists and ground his teeth, and then bowed his hot brow upon his clenched hands. No doubt his father would hear how absurdly Urith had danced at the Cakes, and would laugh over it. He held up his head and looked round him, thinking he heard the cackle of his father, so vividly did he portray the scene to his imagination. No one was in the room save the taverner; but Anthony caught his eye fixed on him, and he turned impatiently away.

Urith was not—there was no blinking the matter—a wife suitable to him. He compared her with his sister. Bessie was sweet, gentle, and with all her amiability dignified; Urith was rough, headstrong, and sullen. She was uncouth, unyielding—did not understand what were the tastes and requirements of a man brought up on a higher plane of refinement. He was weary of her lowering brow, of her silence, her dark eyes with a sombre, smouldering fire in them. He wondered how he could ever have admired her! He never would feel content with her. He had sacrificed for her the most splendid prospects that any man had, and she did not appreciate the sacrifice, and bow down before him and worship him for it.

He knocked over his glass and broke it. By heaven! He wished he had never married Urith.

Anthony stood up, and threw down some coin to pay for his brandy and for the broken glass. He had knocked over the glass in the gesture and start of disgust, when he had wished himself unmarried, and now—he must pay for the glass with money that came to him from Urith. He knew this, it made him writhe, but he quickly deadened the spasm by the consideration that for every groat he had of his wife, he had given up a guinea. She was in debt to him, and the ridiculous little sums placed at his disposal were but an inadequate acknowledgment of the vast indebtedness under which she lay.

He stood for a few minutes irresolute in the rain, uncertain in which direction to turn. Home?—To Willsworthy? To the reproaches of Urith, to the tedious jests and drawled-out songs of Mr. Gibbs? To the sight of Urith ostentatiously holding her hand in a sling to let him know that he had hurt her, when she intercepted the blow aimed at her uncle?

"Pshaw!" said Anthony. "She is not hurt, she cannot be hurt. She caught the stick in her palm. It stung her, no doubt, but will pass. But what an outcry and fuss will be made over it."

Yet his heart reproached him for these complaints. He knew that it was not the way with Urith to make an outcry and a fuss. If he had hurt her, she would disguise the fact. Anyhow, he resolved not to go back to Willsworthy.

Should he go on to Peter Tavy, and visit his cousin Luke?

No—he had no desire for the society of a parson. Luke had married him to Urith; Luke was in part to blame for his present condition of dissatisfaction. Luke might surely; if he had poked about in his books, have discovered some canonical reason why the marriage could not have taken place, at least as early as it did. Then—with delay—his love might have abated, his head would have become cooler, he would have been better able to balance loss and gain.

"Loss and gain!" scoffed Anthony; "all loss and no gain!"

Luke would surmise that all was not right, he was keen-sighted—he had already had the impertinence to give an oblique admonition to Anthony to be tender and forbearing to his wife. If he went to him now, Luke would nail him, and hammer remonstrances into him.

By heaven! no—he wanted no sermons preached to him on week-days.

He walked to the door of Farmer Cudlip. The Cudlips had been on that estate much as the Cleverdons had been at Hall, for centuries, but the Cudlips had owned their own land, as yeomen, whereas the Cleverdons had been tenant-farmers. Now the Cleverdons had taken a vast stride up the ladder, whereas the Cudlips, who had given their name to the hamlet, had remained stationary. The Cudlips, though only yeomen, were greatly respected. Some of the gentle families were of mushroom growth compared with them. It was surmised that the Cudlips had originally been Cutcliffs, and that this yeoman family had issued from the ancient stock of Cutcliffe of Damage, in North Devon, which had gone forth like a scriptural patriarch and made itself a settlement on the verge of the moor, and called the land after its own name; but there was no evidence to prove this. It was at one time a conjecture of a Hector of Peter Tavy, who mentioned it to the Cudlip then at Cudliptown, who shrugged his shoulders and said, "It might be for ought he knew." In the next generation the descent was talked about as all but certain, in the third it was a well-established family tradition.

Anthony stood in the doorway of the old ancestral farm. He had knocked, but received no answer; no one had come to the door in response. He knew or guessed the reason, for overhead he heard Mistress Cudlip putting the youngest child to bed; he had heard the little voice of the child raised in song, chanting its evening hymn:—

Probably Farmer Cudlip was not within. Had he been, the knock of Anthony would have been responded to by a loud and hearty call to come in.

Anthony did not repeat the knock. It was of no use his entering that house if the master were out; he did not want to pass words with women folk. But he halted where he was in order to make up his mind whither he should go. He craved for—not exactly flattery, but something of that adulation which had been lavished on him by all alike—old and young, men and maids—when he was Anthony Cleverdon of Hall, and which had been denied him since he had become Anthony Cleverdon of Willsworthy.

Under the humiliation he had received in his own house, under the sense of disgrace which he had brought on himself, first by his anger over the cradle, and the breaking it down with a blow of an iron bar; then, by his hand raised over an old man, defenceless; he felt a real need for adulation. He could not hold up his head, recover his moral elasticity till he had encountered some one who did not flaunt and beat him down. Fox—should he go and see Fox at Kilworthy? Fox was his friend; Fox had a sharp tongue and could say cutting things that would make him laugh, would shake the moths out of his fretted brain. Yes, he would go to Kilworthy and see Fox.

As he formed this resolution he was conscious that he was false to himself. He did not want to see Fox. Fox would not look up to him with eyes full of loving devotion. Fox's colour would not flush to the cheek when he entered. Fox's pulses would not bound when his step was heard on the gravel. Fox would not in words encourage him to think well of himself, to esteem himself again as the old cock of the walk in plumage, instead of a wretched draggled fowl. No—he did not want to see Fox, but Fox's sister. He would go to Kilworthy to see, to hear Julian Crymes, but he repeated to himself—"I must have a talk with Fox."

Then he heard the little child's voice upstairs repeating the Prayer of Prayers after its mother.

"Forgive us our trespasses," said Mistress Cudlip.

"Tespusses," said the child.

"As we forgive them that trespass against us."

"As we 'give them——" a pause. The mother assisted the little one, and it completed the sentence.

"And lead us not into temptation."

"And lead us not——"

Anthony drew his cloak closer about him, shook the water from Solomon's hat, that he wore, and set it again on his head.

"Into temptation," said the mother.

"Lead us not into temptation," repeated the child. Anthony bent his head, and went out into the rain, went heedless of the warning that hammered at his heart, went wilfully—into temptation.