When George, trembling with passion, left his father’s presence vowing to see his face no more, Squire Heritage did not reproach himself for having goaded the young man to such a frame of mind. When that night the old lodge-keeper came to him and told him that the young squire had ordered his things to be sent after him to London, his master simply said, ‘Send them,’ in a tone which prohibited any further discussion. But when, a fortnight later, Bess Marks disappeared, leaving a note for her father which pointed to only one conclusion, and the squire heard of it, he went to the grief-stricken man and took him kindly by the hand and comforted him. Never was there a greater contrast than between the two fathers—the plebeian and the patrician. The lodge-keeper, a prey to violent grief and heartbroken at his child’s conduct, never breathed a word of reproach against her. He only prayed that, however guilty she might be, no suffering might come near her, but that God would give her back again to his loving and protecting arms. Squire Heritage spoke of his absent son coldly, almost cruelly. It was no secret among the people on the estate that Bess Marks had ‘run away’ with the young squire, and this added to the intensity of his father’s indignation and shame. He felt humiliated, as he stood in the presence of his faithful old retainer, to think that this foul wrong should have been done him by one who bore his name, and his anger against the absent scapegrace was fed by the discovery, as flame is fed with oil. For the mental torture which he endured he sought refuge in the consolations of religion—of a religion which was founded on the fierce moral code of the Old Testament, and ignored the gentler teaching of the New. He became almost a recluse, and passed his days in the old library, building up around the natural instincts of his heart a wall of bigotry, against which the erring son might throw himself in vain. With nothing else to occupy his mind or divert his attention, with no society now but that of the fierce old theologians, his favourite authors, he became a prey to religious monomania, and an intellect long threatened was submerged by a flood of fanaticism. He believed that God called upon him to show his faith as Abraham showed his. His conscience told him that he must cast the erring son off for ever, and that if he shrank from the utmost extremity of punishment he was a weak vessel, who preferred his human affection to his duty to God and man. When once a lonely, narrow-minded man yields to this morbid view, there is no limit to the sway it has over him. Every natural instinct, every human feeling, becomes subservient to it, and the cruellest and most heartless deeds, surrounded by a false religious glamour, seem to him but so many noble actions performed in the service of the Master.