The Argosy — page 178: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

166 A Secret of the Sea. annoyance : he only hoped that Pomeroy would do nothing to disgrace his recommendation. For the present he washed his hands of him. Mr. Kelvin had not been without his own thoughts all this time as to the course he had taken at Olive’s suggestion in keeping from Miss Lloyd the contents of the sealed packet sent him by Miss Bellamy. He was not usually a man whose mind vacillated with regard to any of his‘intentions or purposes. ‘“ There’s no shilly-shallying about Matthew,” his mother would often say. ‘‘ When he sees his point he goes straight at it: fire and water would hardly keep him back.” But in this matter of the sealed packet he did shilly-shally painfully, blowing hot and cold by turns, making up his mind one day that he would tell everything, and being as steadfastly determined the next that he would do nothing of the kind. He was not unaware of the mean- ness of what he was doing ; it was altogether foreign to his notions of right and wrong, to act with anything but the strictest honour towards his clients, rich or poor. Still, about this particular case there was something so exceptional as to remove it out of the ordinary category of purely professional business—that 1s what he said to himself: but the real reason was that his own feelings were more deeply interested than they had ever been before. Under such circumstances it is by no means difficult to argue oneself into the belief that although the action on which we are engaged may not be positively meritorious, it is, at least, one from which no one will suffer. “I am only doing Miss Lloyd a negative wrong,” Kelvin would sometimes say to himself. ‘If anything, she ought to thank me for keeping the secret from her as long as possible.” Having put off the revelation for so long a time, he shrank more than ever from telling her now. One morning on getting up he would swear to himself that he had never loved Eleanor Lloyd as he loved her now: next morning he would vow that he had never hated any human being as he hated her. He had been rendered very wretched by Miss Lloyd’s rejection of his suit ; but with all his unhappiness he had never till now lost his own sense of self-respect : not that he would have admitted for a single moment that he had so lost it. He made believe, even to himself, that it was still as safely in his possession as ever it had been. But the acute consciousness of its loss which came over him at odd times—only to be at once thrust into the background with a firm hand—by no means tended to mitigate the intensity of his determination to be avenged, in one form or another, on the woman to whom he owed this strange new feeling, which net seldom made him shrink within himself, as though he were in reality little better than a whipped cur. Stammars, the residence of Sir Thomas Dudgeon, was, as a family mansion, still quite in its infancy, being something under twenty years old. Sir Thomas had stuck to the old house as long as it was safe for him to do so; but when, during a night of terrible storm, a great part of CORNICE OOS (GO)