The result of Osborne's conference with the two doctors had been
certain prescriptions which appeared to have done him much good,
and which would in all probability have done him yet more, could he
have been free of the recollection of the little patient wife in
her solitude near Winchester. He went to her whenever he could; and,
thanks to Roger, money was far more plentiful with him now than it
had been. But he still shrank, and perhaps even more and more, from
telling his father of his marriage. Some bodily instinct made him
dread all agitation inexpressibly. If he had not had this money from
Roger, he might have been compelled to tell his father all, and to
ask for the necessary funds to provide for the wife and the coming
child. But with enough in hand, and a secret, though remorseful,
conviction that as long as Roger had a penny his brother was sure to
have half of it, made him more reluctant than ever to irritate his
father by a revelation of his secret. "Not just yet, not just at
present," he kept saying both to Roger and to himself. "By-and-by, if
we have a boy, I will call it Roger"--and then visions of poetical
and romantic reconciliations brought about between father and son,
through the medium of a child, the offspring of a forbidden marriage,
became still more vividly possible to him, and at any rate it was a
staving-off of an unpleasant thing. He atoned to himself for taking
so much of Roger's Fellowship money by reflecting that, if Roger
married, he would lose this source of revenue; yet Osborne was
throwing no impediment in the way of this event, rather forwarding it
by promoting every possible means of his brother's seeing the lady of
his love. Osborne ended his reflections by convincing himself of his
own generosity.