"They were welcome to it for him," he said; "he could keep it or want it; and of the two, perhaps, the want of it would come most convenient to him.

He did not exactly think that he had bribed any one; but if the bigwigs chose to say so, it was all one to him.

He was rough and ready, now as ever," &c., &c.
But when the struggle came, it was to him a fearful one; not the less fearful because there was no one, no, not one friend in all the world, to whom he could open his mind and speak out honestly what was in his heart.

To Dr Thorne he might perhaps have done so had his intercourse with the doctor been sufficiently frequent; but it was only now and again when he was ill, or when the squire wanted to borrow money, that he saw Dr Thorne.

He had plenty of friends, heaps of friends in the parliamentary sense; friends who talked about him, and lauded him at public meetings; who shook hands with him on platforms, and drank his health at dinners; but he had no friend who could sit with him over his own hearth, in true friendship, and listen to, and sympathise with, and moderate the sighings of the inner man.