The delirium only came with the accesses of fever, and when sensible, he was very quiet and patient, but always as one weighed down by sense of failure in a trust.  He never seemed to entertain a hope of surviving.  He had watched too many cases not to be aware that his symptoms were those that had been almost uniformly fatal, and he noted them as a matter of course.  Dr. Easterby came to see him, and was greatly touched; Herbert was responsive, but it was not the ordinary form of comfort that he needed, for his sorrow was neither terror nor despair.  His heart was too warm and loving not to believe that his heavenly Father forgave him as freely as did his earthly father; but that very hope made him the more grieved and ashamed of his slurred task, nor did he view his six weeks at Wil’sbro’ as any atonement, knowing it was no outcome of repentance, but of mere kindliness, and aware, as no one else could be, how his past negligence had hindered his full usefulness, so that he only saw his failures.  As to his young life, he viewed it as a mortally wounded soldier does, as a mere casualty of the war, which he was pledged to disregard.  He did perhaps like to think that the fatal night with Gadley might bring Archie back, and yet Jenny did not give him the full peace in her happiness which he had promised himself.

Joanna had suffered terribly, far more than any one knew, and her mind did not take the revulsion as might have been expected.  Her lighthouse was shining again when she thought it extinguished for ever, but her spirits could not bear the uncertainty of the spark.  She could not enter into what Miles and Julius both alike told her, of the impossibility of their mother beginning a prosecution for money embezzled ten years back, when no living witness existed, nothing but the scrap of paper written by Herbert, and signed by him and Margaret Strangeways, authorizing Julius Charnock to use what had been said by the dying, half-delirious man.  What would a jury say to such evidence?  And when Julius said it only freed himself morally from the secrecy, poor Jenny was bitter against his scruples, even though he had never said more than that he should have been perplexed.  The most bitter anti-ritualist could hardly have uttered stronger things than she thought, and sometimes said, against what seemed to her to be keeping Archie in banishment; while the brothers’ reluctance to expose Mr. Moy, and blast his reputation and that of his family, was in her present frame of mind an incomprehensible weakness.  People must bear the penalty of their misdeeds, families and all, and Mrs. and Miss Moy did not deserve consideration:  the pretensions of the mother had always been half scorn, half thorn, to the old county families, and the fast airs of the daughter had been offensive enough to destroy all pity for her.  If an action in a Court of Justice were, as Miles and Julius told her, impossible,—­and she would not believe it, except on the word of a lawyer,—­public exposure was the only alternative for righting Archie, and she could not, or would not, understand that they would have undergone an action for libel rather than not do their best to clear their cousin, but that they thought it due to Mr. Moy to give him the opportunity of doing the thing himself; she thought it folly, and only giving him time and chance for baffling them.