which I did not know were habits.  For is not that always the case?  You don’t know that you are forming a habit:  you take each act to be an individual act, which you may perform or not at will; but, all the same, the succession of them is getting you into its power; custom gets a grip of your ways of thinking as well as your ways of living; the habit is formed, and it does not cease its hold until it conducts you to the grave.  Try Jamaica for a cure.  Fling a sleeping man into the sea, and watch if he does not wake.  Why, when I look back to the slow, methodical, common-place life I led at Eglosilyan, can I wonder that I was sometimes afraid of Wenna Rosewarne regarding me as a somewhat staid and venerable individual, on whose infirmities she ought to take pity?”

He rose and began to walk up and down the verandah, putting his foot down firmly.  His loose linen suit was smart enough:  his complexion had been improved by the sun.  The consciousness that his business affairs were promising well did not lessen his sense of self-importance.

“Wenna must be prepared to move about a bit when I go back,” he was saying to himself.  “She must give up that daily attendance on cottagers’ children.  If all turns out well, I don’t see why we should not live in London, for who will know there who her father was?  That consideration was of no consequence so long as I looked forward to living the rest of my life in Basset Cottage:  now there are other things to be thought of when there is a chance of my going among my old friends again.”

By this time, it must be observed, Mr. Roscorla had abandoned his hasty intention of returning to England to upbraid Wenna with having received a ring from Harry Trelyon.  After all, he reasoned with himself, the mere fact that she should talk thus simply and frankly about young Trelyon showed that, so far as she was concerned, her loyalty to her absent lover was unbroken.  As for the young gentleman himself, he was, Mr. Roscorla knew, fond of joking.  He had doubtless thought it a fine thing to make a fool of two or three women by imposing on them this cock-and-bull story of finding a ring by dredging.  He was a little angry that Wenna should have been deceived; but then, he reflected, these gypsy rings are so much like one another that the young man had probably got a pretty fair duplicate.  For the rest, he did not want to quarrel with Harry Trelyon at present.

But as he was walking up and down the verandah, looking a much younger and brisker man than the Mr. Roscorla who had left Eglosilyan, a servant came through the house and brought him a couple of letters.  He saw they were respectively from Mr. Barnes and from Wenna; and, curiously enough, he opened the reverend gentleman’s first—­perhaps as schoolboys like to leave the best bit of a tart to the last.