Mr. Guyon was not troubled with sensitive feelings, and bashfulness or hesitation in the carrying out of any project on whose execution he had decided were completely foreign to his character. He possessed a happy mixture of hardness and effrontery, which enabled him to do very cruel things with charming lightness of heart and an engaging unconsciousness of demeanour, which had occasionally even deluded his victims themselves into thinking his intentions more harmless than his acts. He was a man whom even remorse, the evil form of repentance, had never visited, and who had never believed in any agency more supernatural than _luck_. He had been accustomed to watch the variations of that divinity pretty closely, and had arrived at a sort of scheme of its operations; and just now he regarded good fortune as in the ascendant--a conviction which received signal confirmation by the success of his interview with Streightley. He had not distinctly acknowledged to himself that he dreaded finding an obstacle in Robert's conscientiousness; he had rather put his apprehensions to the score of the "City man's" pride. "I can't pretend that she likes him, or that she does not like Frere," he had said over and over again, as he turned the hopeful project, which had succeeded so perfectly, in his mind. "He is not quite such a flat as to believe any thing of that sort. It all depends on his being satisfied to have the girl at any price; and he knows so little of the world and of women, that I do believe he'll be idiot enough to take her against her will. A pretty life she'll lead him; but that's no business of mine." Mr. Guyon possessed one trivial and negative virtue--he never tried to deceive himself. Perhaps one reason why his hypocrisy had frequently been crowned with success was, that he reserved it entirely for his transactions, sternly extruding it from his meditations. _Vis-à-vis_ Ned Guyon, he was the soul of candour. True to this characteristic, when screwing up his courage to the inevitable interview with his daughter, which was the next performance in his programme, Mr. Guyon did not try to persuade himself, as a more shallow scoundrel would have done, that he was in reality doing the very best thing within his power for her, and establishing, in truth, a clear claim to her gratitude. He did not repeat that the man she loved was a frivolous fellow, who could never fill the heart and the intellect of such a woman, and was unworthy of her affection. He said nothing to himself of all he had said to Robert Streightley. He knew nothing, and he cared nothing about Frere's character; and the consideration of Katharine's unhappiness did not concern him in the least. "She will be very rich," he thought; "and if that does not make her happy, she is a greater fool than I take her for--a greater fool even than Streightley."