Gothard. I doubt whether
he had enjoyed the trip more than I did myself, but it was not till we
were on the point of returning that Ernest had recovered strength
enough to be called fairly well, and it was not for many months that
he so completely lost all sense of the wounds which the last four
years had inflicted on him as to feel as though there were a scar
and a scar only remaining.
They say that when people have lost an arm or a foot they feel pains
in it now and again for a long while after they have lost it. One pain
which he had almost forgotten came upon him on his return to
England, I mean the sting of his having been imprisoned. As long as he
was only a small shopkeeper his imprisonment mattered nothing;
nobody knew of it, and if they had known they would not have cared;
now, however, though he was returning to his old position he was
returning to it disgraced, and the pain from which he had been saved
in the first instance by surroundings so new that he had hardly
recognised his own identity in the middle of them, came on him as from
a wound inflicted yesterday.
He thought of the high resolves which he had made in prison about
using his disgrace as a vantage ground of strength rather than
trying to make people forget it.
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