Never before was his impulse to tell Dolly who he was and snatch her from the misery, the unmeet sorrow that encompassed her, so powerful. Love and pity strove with the dread of dishonouring her by the revelation. Could he endure to think that this delicate, gentle girl was linked to a man who neglected her, who might even ill-treat her, who at that moment might be squandering the money that had been given him on his own gross appetites, without thought of the wife and child wanting bread at home? What must be the issue of such a life if it were permitted to endure? Sooner or later Holdsworth must avow himself to save her and his child from that uttermost degree of ruin and misery to which Conway was dragging them. He had hoped to devote his life to them. His dream had been that Conway’s character was not irretrievably bad, that kindly entreaty, cordial advice, and pecuniary help might bring him to a knowledge of his folly and set him once more on the high-road to respectability. Such a redemption would have been Holdsworth’s sacrifice; but his own happiness was as nothing in his eyes compared to Dolly’s. Faithfully would he have performed his duty to her, nobly would he have vindicated his own most honourable, most exalted devotion, could he have reclaimed this erring man and taught him to give his wife as much happiness as it was possible for a heart that ceaselessly mourned a dead love, to know. Thus he could have been his Dolly’s good angel, and whilst God permitted him, have kept watch over her and her child, dead to her belief, but active as the holiest love could make life in his helpful secret guardianship. He perceived the vanity of that hope now, and yet despairingly clung to it, because, if he surrendered it, he felt that he must confess himself, and from this he shrank as from a deed that would inflict a deeper degradation upon her, while Conway lived, than any she could suffer from her husband’s behaviour. One must either entirely sympathise with his profound susceptibility of the obligation his supposed death had forced upon him to fulfil, or ridicule him as a man absurdly fantastical in his views of morality. There seems no middle standpoint to judge him from. But unless there be too much austerity in his virtue to make it admirable, then, to properly appreciate it, we must remember the extraordinary tenderness of his nature, his exquisite sensibility, which shrank from the mere thought of tarnishing the pure honour of the woman he loved.