Oliver had not been greatly attracted previously to these reverent Weatherleys, in any chance intercourse which he had held with them. He had respected them as very worthy people, but they had seemed to him, what they were, somewhat fanatical and narrow in their views. As for Harry Stanhope, no two persons could have been more widely removed from what he had proved hitherto, or could have possessed less in common with his past, than the strongly professional as well as pious couple who were taking, but scarcely enjoying, a compulsory breathing space in their toiling life. But from the moment that Mrs. Weatherley’s motherliness appropriated the care of Fan’s baby, Harry, as it were, instinctively—with another of his instincts of self-preservation probably—took to her and clung to her and her husband in his misery, with a pathetic dependence and trust, to which they were not slow to respond. Indeed, Harry’s remorse from an early stage assumed the form of contriteness rather than despair, his natural humility and amiability standing him in good stead here. Fan had willed his rescue from folly and evil with her whole devoted heart, and though he would never now have the consolation—the positive gladness, of proving to her that he was a rescued man, and so, of more than making up to her, in her love, for all the anguish he had cost her, he was still, in his present mood, eager to do what Fan had wished, to be as she had chosen for him, in his best interests. He trusted brokenly that it might atone—if it were only to her memory, that Fan might know he was sorry and was pulling himself up, somehow, sometime—that Fan’s God and his would accept and confirm the late repentance in the great redemption He has provided for sinners. Poor Harry had never been proud, and he was not afflicted with the insane egotism which sees in its possessor an object of such consequence in the universe, to his Maker no less than to himself, that he must needs interfere with the working of human and divine love. Such a one-sided reasoner will hold, against every assurance to the contrary, that he has sinned beyond forgiveness, and it is too late for him to repent and think better of it. In fact, there is a false Mephistopheles dignity and subtle compensation in this conclusion, when shame, regret, and grief still take the attitude of resentful defiance.