He had passed his first weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and country friends should recognise him again and condone his "irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through his head.

He meant to let people see that he would be a good neighbour if they would give him the chance--not like that miserly fool, his brother Robert.

The past was so much past; who now was more respectable or more well intentioned than he?
He was an impressionable imaginative man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts, partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past catastrophe.

Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after such a lapse?
He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child.

These things, if the truth were known, were indeed due rather to a certain lack of physical energy and vitality, which age had developed in him, than to self-conquest; but he was no doubt entitled to make the most of them.
There were signs indeed that his forecast had been not at all unreasonable.