that he would fain know precisely what degree of evil he must ask her to face before he asked at all.  He told himself that he shrank not so much on account of his own dislike, as on account of the difficulty in which his offer and explanation must place her if she loved him; for if she was not bound strongly by the prejudices of her class, all those she cared for certainly were.  On the other hand, if she did not love him, then, indeed, he had reason to shrink from an interview that would be the taking away of all his hope.  Who would not wrestle hard with hope and fear before facing such an alternative?  Certainly not a man of Trenholme’s stamp.

It is a mistake to suppose that decision and fearlessness are always the attributes of strength.  Angels will hover in the equipoise of indecision while clowns will make up their minds.  Many a fool will rush in to woo and win a woman, who makes her after-life miserable by inconsiderate dealings with incongruous circumstance, in that very unbending temper of mind through which he wins at first.  Trenholme did not love the less, either as lover or brother, because he shrank, as from the galling of an old wound, when the family trade was touched upon.  He was not a weaker man because he was capable of this long suffering.  That nature has the chance to be the strongest whose sensibilities have the power to draw nourishment of pain and pleasure from every influence; and if such soul prove weak by swerving aside because of certain pains, because of stooping from the upright posture to gain certain pleasures, it still may not be weaker than the more limited soul who knows not such temptations.  If Trenholme had swerved from the straight path, if he had stooped from the height which nature had given him, the result of his fault had been such array of reasons and excuses that he did not now know that he was in fault, but only had hateful suspicion of it when he was brought to the pass of explaining himself to his lady-love.  The murmurs of an undecided conscience seldom take the form of definite self-accusation.  They did not now; and Trenholme’s suspicion that he was in the wrong only obtruded itself in the irritating perception that his trouble had a ludicrous side.  It would have been easier for him to have gone to Sophia with confession of some family crime or tragedy than to say to her, “My father was, my brother is, a butcher; and I have allowed this fact to remain untold!” It was not that he did not intend to prove to her that his silence on this subject was simply wise; he still writhed under the knowledge that such confession, if it did not evoke her loving sympathy, might evoke her merriment.