When in his lonely walks round the estate he passed some wretched tramp on his way to the workhouse, he would fancy his son, reduced to such a position after a career of dissipation, perishing friendless and without hope. Then he would shudder and ask himself if he were justified in thus ruining the worldly prospects of his only son for life, and giving his inheritance to a stranger. But at night, with the Bible open before him, and the passionate Hebrew invective against the evildoer appealing to his narrowed vision, he cast these forebodings to the wind. Such thoughts were thoughts sent by the devil to weaken his determination. Were not all the servants of God tempted in like manner to swerve from the path of duty, and was it not always the natural impulses of the heart that were sought to be turned to their undoing? So the gloomy train of thought led him away, till he was prepared to listen to each chord of human sympathy which memory awoke in him as one struck by the tempter’s fingers. CHAPTER XXIX. THE BURGLARY AT THE HALL. Night had come upon the old hall, and the fresh spring wind, trying to whistle a tune for the young leaves to dance to, was the only thing that disturbed the perfect calm which had fallen upon the spot. Up in his library at the hall the squire sat among his books and papers. Beside him lay a packet of faded yellow letters—the letters his wife had written him during their happy married life There were not many of them, for they were seldom apart, and the opportunity for correspondence had rarely arisen. He had found them to-night in a box to which he had gone for something else, and he had read them over. All of them mentioned George. They had been written mostly when George was a little lad, one year that the squire had gone abroad for six weeks by himself. As the old man read the words of tender love and devotion, he thanked God that this fond heart, at least, had ceased to beat ere its idol could grow up to break it. Then he wondered if things would have been different had she lived. Perhaps he had been too severe and expected too much. He read the lines traced by the hand long cold in the grave, and a strange sense of uneasiness came over him. It seemed as though the spirit of the dead woman was pleading with him for her boy. The hereafter was a mystery. If the eyes of the saints look down upon earth, what would the mother in heaven think of the father who robbed his son of his inheritance and left him a beggar? The old man was low and desponding, and his mind was none too vigorous now. Strange fancies came to him at times. He wrestled with the devil in spirit, and endeavoured to ascribe every trifling incident to the direct interposition of Providence.