Here was a ten-pound note lying, one might say, by the very roadside, and it would save a family from privation.

Abstractly, it was wrong; yes, it was wrong; but would abstract right feed him and pay his rent for the year to come?
Hood had reached this stage in his self-examination; he strengthened himself by protest against the order of things.

His headache nursed the tendency to an active discontent, to which, as a rule, his temperament did not lend itself.
But there remained the telling of the lie.

How he wished that Emily were not at home! To lie before Emily, that was the hardest part of his self-imposed task.

He could not respect his wife, but before Emily, since her earliest companionship with him, he had watched his words scrupulously; as a little girl she had so impressed him with the purity of her heart that his love for her had been the nearest approach he ever knew to the spirit of worship; and since her attainment of mental and moral independence, his reverence for' her had not been unmixed with awe.