get out of the scrape.  It is not much of a scrape, for when an older man comes this way, a man verging toward baldness, with a good professional income, our little friend is forgotten and he is passed by without a word.  But Harry had now a conviction,—­on that one special night,—­that he never would be forgotten and never would forget.  He was filled at once with an unwonted pride.  All the world was now at his feet, and all the stars were open to him.  He had begun to have a glimmering of what it was that Augustus Scarborough intended to do; but the intentions of Augustus Scarborough were now of no moment to him.  He was clothed in a panoply of armor which would be true against all weapons.  At any rate, on that night and during the next day this feeling remained the same with him.

Then he received a summons from his mother at Buston.  His mother pressed him to come at once down to the parsonage.  “Your uncle has been with your father, and has said terrible things about you.  As you know, my brother is not very strong-minded, and I should not care so much for what he says were it not that so much is in his hands.  I cannot understand what it is all about, but your father says that he does nothing but threaten.  He talks of putting the entail on one side.  Entails used to be fixed things, I thought; but since what old Mr. Scarborough did nobody seems to regard them now.  But even suppose the entail does remain, what are you to do about the income?  Your father thinks you had better come down and have a little talk about the matter.”

This was the first blow received since the moment of his exaltation.  Harry knew very well that the entail was fixed, and could not be put aside by Mr. Prosper, though Mr. Scarborough might have succeeded with his entail; but yet he was aware that his present income was chiefly dependent on his uncle’s good-will.  To be reduced to live on his fellowship would be very dreadful.  And that income, such as it was, depended entirely on his celibacy.  And he had, too, as he was well aware, engendered habits of idleness during the last two years.  The mind of a young man so circumstanced turns always first to the Bar, and then to literature.  At the Bar he did not think that there could be any opening for him.  In the first place, it was late to begin; and then he was humble enough to believe of himself that he had none of the peculiar gifts necessary for a judge or for an advocate.  Perhaps the knowledge that six or seven years of preliminary labor would be necessary was somewhat of a deterrent.

The rewards of literature might be achieved immediately.  Such was his idea.  But he had another idea,—­perhaps as erroneous,—­that this career would not become a gentleman who intended to be Squire of Buston.  He had seen two or three men, decidedly Bohemian in their modes of life, to whom he did not wish to assimilate himself.  There was Quaverdale, whom he had known intimately at St. John’s, and who was on the