THOUGH, however, Wilfred could not rise, he could, when at last he found himself alone, think; and Heaven only knows how exceedingly bitter were his thoughts. For some hours he lay like one stunned, trying, but trying in vain, to see his way out of the maze of sin and misery in which he was involved. Lionel, his heroic brother; Evelyn, his tenderly loved and loving sister; the grey old Rector, who had been his steadfast friend and adviser from childhood upwards; and Mary Elthorne, his sister’s friend--what would all these think of him? And the village lads at Holmcastle, his companions in every manly game, and to whom erewhile he had been the friend and adviser--would not they too, when they came to know it, despise him in their honest hearts? He had loved those rough, honest, true-hearted fellows as friends and comrades, with that love which, in this country, thank God, so often subsists between the best-born and the rural poor--a thing which it enters not into the heart of a United States republican to conceive or understand; and now Wilfred felt he dare not look one of them in the face. And his father? His father had indeed been a cold, unsympathetic parent, so far as personal intercourse was concerned, and there had been little or no confidence between them; but the boy reflected that he owed food, and raiment, and education, and many of the joys of life to him alone, and his grateful heart swelled with grief at the disappointment he would feel. Wilfred probably appreciated anything which was of good in his father’s character more, and loved him better, than did his other children. He had the poet’s gift of idealising. His own high-strung, enthusiastic nature led him to feel that his father’s foibles, ridiculous and even wrong as they were when viewed from some aspects, had yet for their basis something which, if not noble, was at least unsordid. At all events, they sprang not from that “_fons et origo mali_,” the base love of money. His father’s family pride was in some respects redeemed by the fact that he could _make_ nothing by it; and Wilfred mourned as he thought of the shock which the announcement he would surely receive would have on his father’s reserved and proud nature. It may seem strange, but it is nevertheless true, that the thought of attempting to justify himself scarcely even entered into the lad’s over-sensitive mind. The foul accusation had been made, that accusation was supported by a chain of circumstantial evidence, and he felt he was doomed to take the consequences. As regarded justification, he must let that alone for ever. Bowed down in the dust of the degradation of the present hour, the boy could look out with no hope upon the future; all was a blank before him. Heretofore, to his poetic soul, life itself had been very dear, and his happiness in that life had been great and vivid. Heretofore, his young life had been to him as life was to Adam before the fall. That was the outcome and the reward of his innocence.