“Very well, I’ve no objection on earth; and now we need not say another word about it.”

“Only one word more, Mr. Harding.  Chadwick has referred me to lawyers.  In what I do I may appear to be interfering with you, and I hope you will forgive me for doing so.”

“Mr. Bold,” said the other, speaking with some solemnity, “if you act justly, say nothing in this matter but the truth, and use no unfair weapons in carrying out your purposes, I shall have nothing to forgive.  I presume you think I am not entitled to the income I receive from the hospital, and that others are entitled to it.  Whatever some may do, I shall never attribute to you base motives because you hold an opinion opposed to my own and adverse to my interests; pray do what you consider to be your duty; I can give you no assistance, neither will I offer you any obstacle.  Let me, however, suggest to you that you can in no wise forward your views, nor I mine, by any discussion between us.  Here comes Eleanor and the ponies, and we’ll go in to tea.”

Bold felt that he could not sit down at ease with Mr. Harding and his daughter after what had passed, and therefore excused himself with much awkward apology; and, merely raising his hat and bowing as he passed Eleanor and the pony chair, left her in disappointed amazement at his departure.

III.—­Iphigenia

The bedesmen heard a whisper that they were entitled to one hundred pounds a year, and signed a petition, which Abel Handy drew up, to the bishop as visitor, praying his lordship to see justice done to the legal recipients of John Hiram’s charity.  John Bold was advised to institute formal proceedings against Mr. Harding and Mr. Chadwick.  Archdeacon Grantly took up the cause of the warden, and obtained a legal opinion from the attorney general, Sir Abraham Haphazard, that Mr. Harding and Mr. Chadwick being only paid servants, the action should not have been brought against them, but that the defendants should have been either the corporation of Barchester, or possibly the dean and chapter, or the bishop.  That all-powerful organ of the press, the daily Jupiter, launched a leading thunderbolt against the administration of Hiram’s Hospital, which made out the warden to be a man unjust, grasping—­and the responsibility for this attack rested upon John Bold’s friend Tom Towers, of the Temple.

Bold kept away from the warden’s house, but he met Miss Harding one day in the cathedral close.  He tried to explain and apologised.

“Mr. Bold,” said she, “you may be sure of one thing:  I shall always judge my father to be right, and those who oppose him I shall judge to be wrong.”  And then, curtsying low, she sailed on, leaving her lover in anything but a happy state of mind.

To her father Eleanor owned that she had loved John Bold once, but would not, could not do so now, when he proved himself the enemy of her father.

But the warden, wretched as he was at the attacks of the Jupiter, declared that Bold was no enemy of his, and encouraged her love, and then he spoke to her of happier days when their trials would all be over.