It is not merely religious, or what many would call fanatical, people who are brought to comprehend the sorrowful wonder of the demand, ‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ For the fate of a soul even here in the light of goodness and loyal obedience to God’s laws, or of turbulent rebellion against them, with all future honour and happiness, or all future disgrace and misery at stake—be it in the case of a not overwise lad like Harry Stanhope—is really of greater moment and of more intense interest to kindred humanity, than all the natural beauties and all the acted out history of the universe. Place a drowning man in juxtaposition with the finest, most suggestive landscape in the world, and what spectator—not to speak of the unhappy mortal’s familiar friends, would not—conscious of his fellow-creature’s strait—turn his back on senseless matter and the dead past? Unless, indeed, the looker-on were morally dwarfed, distorted, and hardened almost beyond recognition by his kind crying shame on him, with honest disgust for his unnatural conduct, he would watch, if he could do no more, with a sympathetic agony of eagerness, the hard fight for life of his perishing brother—how he clutched desperately each bough and every twig in his path,—how he struck out gallantly for a space till he was well-nigh beyond the engulphing wave,—how he faltered and gave way, and was sucked back into the insatiable jaws of the overmastering tide. The Stanhopes, with Oliver in their company, went on like the wandering Jew, as if there were no end to their wandering, no rest for the soles of their feet. They lived their own throbbing, high-strung family life, till other lives beyond theirs looked distant, pale, and dim, like lives in dreams. Tidings from the old home came to the wayfarers, and did not move them, or only awoke in them dull or fitful responses. A bachelor uncle of Harry and Horace Stanhope’s died, and, with some dawning suspicion in his last days that he had left his brother’s orphan boys very much to sink or swim as they could, sought to anticipate the moment of reckoning by an act of atonement. He chose to bequeath the sum of eight thousand pounds—the bulk of his savings in a colonial office—to the poor relations whom he had shunned and ignored as much as he could, in the course of their previous existence, instead of to the well-to-do flesh and blood whom he had hitherto exclusively cultivated. The timely legacy—together with what was left of Fan’s means, would form a little competence for the Stanhopes, if they made up their minds to settle in some quiet way abroad. The subject scarcely struck any of the pilgrims in this light. Would it not rather deal the death-stroke to Harry by supplying him with independent funds, other than his wife’s, for squandering and riot?