“It was very bad,” murmured Honor; “but I suppose that if Mr. Duberly had thought the contrary, he might have refused his consent to your marriage, and then his daughter would have been wretched. Still, indeed, indeed, you had better--don’t you think so now?--have been quite open with him. If you had said--” “Yes, yes, I know; but who ever does the right thing at the right time? And, besides, I could not be sure, as you have just said, and knowing old Duberly as I do now, that he would have allowed his daughter to be my wife if he had been told the truth. His horror of what he calls gambling is stronger than anything you can conceive. I hear him say things sometimes which convince me that he would rather have given Sophy to a beggar--a professional one, I mean--than to me; and if he _had_ acted as I feared, what, in the name of all that is horrible, was to become of me? The tradesmen, the name of whose ‘little accounts’ is legion, only showed me mercy, the cormorants! because of the rich marriage which they believed was to come off; while the Jews, the cent-percent fellows--but what do you know of bills and renewals, of the misery of feeling that a day of reckoning is coming round--a horrible day when you must either put the gold for which those devils would sell their souls into their grasping hands, or by a dash of your pen plunge deeper and deeper into the gulf of ruin and despair? But there are other and more oppressive debts even than these, Honor--debts which I have no hopes of paying, except through one blessed chance, one interposition of Providence or fate--for I don’t suppose that Providence troubles itself much with my miserable concerns--in my behalf.” “And that chance?” put in Honor, imagining that he waited to be questioned. “That chance is the winning of the Derby to-morrow by Rough Diamond. I have no bets, at least nothing but trifling ones, on the race; but if the horse wins, his value will, as of course you know, rise immeasurably, and with the money I can sell him for I shall be able, for a time, to set myself tolerably straight. Your father--whose horse you have, I suppose, hitherto fancied Rough Diamond to be--has, he tells me, backed him for all that he is worth. My reason for not doing so has been that I am not up to making a book, and that the debts of honour I already groan under are sufficiently burdensome without incurring others which I might not be able to pay.” “How anxious you must be and unhappy!” Honor said pityingly. “But there is one thing which puzzles me, and that is, how you could keep all this a secret from your wife. Surely she would have been silent; surely she might have softened her father, and made all smooth between you.”