He could not combine the brutal judge and the industrious, dispassionate student; the connecting link escaped him; from such a dual nature, it was impossible he should predict behaviour; and he asked himself if he had done well to plunge into a business of which the end could not be foreseen?
and presently after, with a sickening decline of confidence, if he had done loyally to strike his father?
For he had struck him--defied him twice over and before a cloud of witnesses--struck him a public buffet before crowds.

Who had called him to judge his father in these precarious and high questions?
The office was usurped.

It might have become a stranger; in a son--there was no blinking it--in a son, it was disloyal.

And now, between these two natures so antipathetic, so hateful to each other, there was depending an unpardonable affront: and the providence of God alone might foresee the manner in which it would be resented by Lord Hermiston.
These misgivings tortured him all night and arose with him in the winter's morning; they followed him from class to class, they made him shrinkingly sensitive to every shade of manner in his companions, they sounded in his ears through the current voice of the professor; and he brought them home with him at night unabated and indeed increased.

The cause of this increase lay in a chance encounter with the celebrated Dr.
Gregory.