They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits to their parents.  Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and disinterested.  More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching.  Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel’s former feeling revived in him—­that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.  Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.  Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated.  Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

“I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,” Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity.  “And, therefore, we must make the best of it.  But I do entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals.  Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless.”

“Of course it may,” said Angel.  “Was it not proved nineteen hundred years ago—­if I may trespass upon your domain a little?  Why should you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals?”

“Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation—­it may be fancy only—­that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp.  Hasn’t it struck you, Cuthbert?”

“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.”

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at which their father’s and mother’s morning work in the parish usually concluded.  Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse dapes inemptae of the dairyman’s somewhat coarsely-laden table.  But neither of the old people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting that their parents entered.  The self-denying pair had been occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.