But there were in Julian Romayne tendencies, latent, or nearly so, throughout his youth and early manhood; manifested during those easy, untempted periods only in a slight superficiality, a slight want of perception as to the boundary line between truth and falsehood; but radical factors in his being. In the shock and jar of the mental struggle and quickening involved in the continued presence in his consciousness of that remorseless dart, these tendencies leapt into over-stimulated life and grew, strengthened, and developed, with the unnatural rapidity of such life, until his whole character seemed to be over-shadowed by them. In Julian Romayne’s being, woven in and out with the threads which had hitherto seemed so pliable and colourless; those threads of all shades, from pure white to dark grey, which make up character in every man; were sundry grim black threads--threads such as are only to be plucked out when the very heart’s blood of the man has spent itself in the struggle, and when in that struggle he has come very near to God. It may be that the sins of the fathers are indeed visited on the children in this sense; in the dictation of the form taken by that struggle with evil which is every man’s portion; and sometimes--for purposes of which no man may presume to judge--in the exceptional agony of that struggle. Julian Romayne, the son of a liar and thief, and, moreover, of a woman whose morality was the morality of conventionality and nothing more, had an instinctive faculty for, an instinctive inclination towards, dishonesty of word and deed. Such a twist of his moral consciousness as had been predicted for him, a little child of five years old, by Dr. Aston, had lain dormant among the possibilities of his being throughout the nineteen years that intervened. It was this inheritance which, in the sudden upheaval of his moral nature, had awakened, asserted itself, and seized, as it were, the first place in his nature.