“I--I f-foresee the hour when you will have to deny me,” said the young man, in his difficult speech. “You must get out of this habit of being low-spirited,” said James Dodson, to whom this speech was incoherent. “It might help to give you away. And I can’t impress it upon you too strongly that if Octavius should ever come at the truth--kind-hearted old duffer as he is--he will be only too ready to do what he calls his duty. As for me, I say right here, that whatever you did, Luney, having known you so long, and having come to know you so well, James Dodson could never look upon you as a wrong ’un. I’ll tell you, my son, in what light I have come to regard you, although it has taken me years to come at the truth. You are one of those fine mathematical instruments which can register things that ordinary instruments know nothing about. You are no earthly use for straight-forward, common, practical, two-and-two-makes-four sort of life, but it has begun to dawn on me lately, that you must have a wonderful mind for some things. It is only lately that I have begun to notice it. But now and then you seem to come out with something that is--well, that is downright marvellous for a chap like you. In odd out-of-the-way subjects, that are not a ha’porth of use to anybody, you have a knack of saying things that chaps like John Dobbs and Joe Cox can’t even understand. My own private opinion is that you _can’t_ be such a fool as you seem. I believe, Luney, that you ought to be kept under a glass case in a box lined with felt, because the slightest thing, even a change in the weather, is enough to throw you off your balance.” Having thus delivered himself, and at an unexampled length, Mr. Dodson left his distracted friend to continue in that phase of remorse whose effect upon him was so dire. Throughout the long hours of the afternoon the need for immediate action never left his mind. Already he had let the golden moment pass; every hour that followed would increase the likelihood that he would fail to derive the courage for his task. Even his brave, but misguided, friend, whose counsels were so subtle and so specious, had come to seem in his power to put a gloss on the cruellest of temptations, to be neither more nor less than the embodiment of evil.