Yes, religion could console him for the loss of any worldly good, but was his religion of that active sort which would enable him so to repent of misspent years as to pass those that were left to him in a spirit of hope for the future?
And such repentance itself, is it not a work of agony and of tears?
It is very easy to talk of repentance, but a man has to walk over hot ploughshares before he can complete it; to be skinned alive as was St.Bartholomew; to be stuck full of arrows as was St.Sebastian; to lie broiling on a gridiron like St.Lorenzo! How if his past life required such repentance as this?
Had he the energy to go through with it?
Mr.Harding, after leaving the palace, walked slowly for an hour or so beneath the shady elms of the close and then betook himself to his daughter's house.

He had at any rate made up his mind that he would go out to Plumstead to consult Dr.Grantly, and that he would in the first instance tell Eleanor what had occurred.
And now he was doomed to undergo another misery.

Mr.Slope had forestalled him at the widow's house.

He had called there on the preceding afternoon.

He could not, he had said, deny himself the pleasure of telling Mrs.Bold that her father was about to return to the pretty house at Hiram's Hospital.