Reiver till the end of the
season, adoring her in a quiet and deferential way as an angel from heaven.
Later on he took to riding--not hacking, but honest riding--which was good
proof that he was improving, and you could slam doors behind him without his
jumping to his feet with a gasp. That, again, was hopeful.
How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning, nobody knows. He
certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a man who has drank
heavily can do. He took his peg and wine at dinner, but he never drank alone,
and never let what he drank have the least hold on him.
Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how the
"influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well" had saved him. When
the man--startled at anything good being laid to Mrs. Reiver's door--laughed,
it cost him Moriarty's friendship.
Moriarty, who is married now to a woman ten thousand times better than Mrs.
Reiver--a woman who believes that there is no man on earth as good and clever
as her husband--will go down to his grave vowing and protesting that Mrs.
Reiver saved him from ruin in both worlds.
That she knew anything of Moriarty's weakness nobody believed for a moment.
That she would have cut him dead, thrown him over, and acquainted all her
friends with her discovery, if she had known of it, nobody who knew her
doubted for an instant.
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