This brought Gervase to his senses. He was--oh, so tender of her weakness, of the excited nerves of which she had lost control, and the evident long tension of her feelings, which had broken at last. He took her into his arms and soothed her, calling her by every tender name he could think of. “What a brute I am--to torment you with all my whims and scruples! All you say is like gospel, Madeline. I know, I know it is all true. I don’t know what I deserve for troubling you with these idiotic fancies of mine. I know I ought to be too thankful that everything is thus made possible for us. And so I shall be when I have time to think. It is only the first shock, the conviction that my father----” “Gervase,” she said, “don’t let any one but me hear you speak of him as you have done. He is your father. And how can you tell whether he is to blame? By you at least he should never be made to appear so. I feel sure--that he is not to blame.” “If you think so, I will think so too,” he cried fervently. And he did his best to keep his word. He kept it at least in her presence, while her faith influenced him. If his heart sank when he was alone, nobody was the wiser. And, indeed, from this moment the pace of events was so much accelerated that Gervase had much less time to think. Mr Thursley received the news of his sudden accession of wealth with a long whistle, in which was surprise, yet something else besides surprise. “I thought as much,” he said, nodding his head; but what he thought he did not explain. He went chuckling about the house for the remainder of the day, uttering now and then a broken exclamation in which there was something about an old fox. Gervase was wise enough to ask no explanations. He felt in his heart that Mr Thursley thought as he did, but was not wounded as he was by the thought: and the young man breathed a sigh of relief, and thanked heaven that he was freed for ever from those methods and tenets, which made it not entirely blamable in a man to hold back something that was not his, and make meet provision for his own necessities, while preserving the semblance of perfect honour to others. He himself had to keep silence, or to consent to be considered ultra-fantastical even by the woman he loved. He yielded to fate, not willingly, with a sense of repugnance, and resistance which would have seemed extraordinary, unjustifiable almost to all reasonable people. Perhaps it was no great shadow among all the brightness that now surrounded him, but still he felt it to the bottom of his heart. CHAPTER X.