To do him justice, Arthur had hitherto seen the thing only by his own lights. He had looked on it as a case of all for fortune and the rest well lost, and he had even pictured himself in the guise of a hero, who took the risks and shared the benefits. If the act were ill, at least, he considered, he did it in a good cause; and where, after all, was the harm in assuming a loan of something which would never be missed, which would be certainly repaid, and which, in his hands, would save a hundred homes from ruin? The argument had sounded convincing at the time. Then, for the risk, what was it, when examined? It was most unlikely that the Squire would discover the trick, and if he did he could not, hard and austere as he was, prosecute his own flesh and blood. Nay, Arthur doubted if he could prosecute, since he had signed the transfer with his own hand—it was no forgery. At the worst, then and if discovery came, it would mean the loss of the Squire’s favor and banishment from the house. Both of these things he had experienced before, and in his blindness he did not despair of reinstating himself a second time. He had a way with him, he had come to think that few could resist him. He was far, very far, from understanding how the Squire would view the act. But now the mists of self-deception were for the moment blown aside, and he saw the gulf on the edge of which he stood, and into which a word might precipitate him. If the pig-headed fool before him did what he said he would, and preferred a charge, the India House might take it up; and, pitiless where its interests were in question, it might prove as inexorable as the Bank had proved in the case of Fauntleroy only the year before. In that event, what might not be the end? His uncle had signed the transfer, and at the time that had seemed enough; it had seemed to secure him from the worst. But now—now when so much hung upon it, he doubted. He had not inquired, he had not dared to inquire how the law stood, but he knew that the law’s uncertainties were proverbial and its ambages beyond telling. And the India House, like the Bank of England, was a terrible foe. Once launched on the slope, let the cell door once close on him, he might slip with fatal ease from stage to stage, until the noose hung dark and fearful before him, and all the influence, all the help he could command, might then prove powerless to save him! It was a terrible machine—the law! The cell, the court, the gallows, with what swiftness, what inevitableness, what certainty, did they not succeed one another—dark, dismal stages on the downward progress! How swiftly, how smoothly, how helplessly had that other banker traversed them! How irresistibly had they borne him to his doom!