“It’s not a thing I want to talk about, Sam.  I had to hit him and I didn’t know how; that’s all.  Put on the gloves again.”

“There, that’ll do, sir.  You’re light on your pins, and he’s sort of slow.  If you ever have to fight him, just remember that and keep cool and keep moving.”

The young boxing-tutor was silently of opinion that John Penhallow would not be satisfied until he had faced Tom again.  John made believe, as we say, that he had no such desire.  He had, however, long been caressed and flattered into the belief that he was important, and was, in his uncle’s army phrase, to be obeyed and respected accordingly by inferiors.  His whole life now for many months had, however, contributed experiences contradictory to his tacitly accepted boy-views.  Sometimes in youth the mental development and conceptions of what seem desirable in life appear to make abrupt advances without apparent bodily changes.  More wholesomely and more rarely at the plastic age characteristics strengthen and mind and body both gather virile capacity.  When John Penhallow met his cousin on his first arrival, he was in enterprise, vigour, general good sense and normal relation to life, really far younger than Leila.  In knowledge, mind and imagination, he was far in advance.  In these months he had passed her in the race of life.  He felt it, but in many ways was also dimly aware that Leila was less expressively free in word and action, sometimes to his surprise liking to be alone at the age when rare moods of mild melancholy trouble the time of rapid female florescence.  There was still between them acceptance of equality, with on his part a certain growth of respectful consideration, on hers a gentle perception of his gain in manliness and of deference to his experience of a world of which she knew as yet nothing, but with some occasional resentment when the dominating man in the boy came to the surface.  When his aunt praised his manners, Leila said, “He isn’t always so very gentle.”  When his uncle laughed at his awkward horsemanship, she defended him, reminding her uncle, to his amusement, of her own early mishaps.

CHAPTER V

John’s intimacy with the Squire prospered.  Leila had been a gay comrade, but not as yet so interested as to tempt him to discussion of the confusing politics of the day.  “She has not as yet a seeking mind,” said the rector, who in the confessional of the evening pipe saw more and more plainly that this was a divided house.  The Squire could not talk politics with Ann, his wife.  She held a changeless belief in regard to slavery, a conviction of its value to owner and owned too positive to be tempted into discussing it with people who knew so little of it and did not agree with her.  James Penhallow, like thousands in that day of grim self-questioning, had been forced to reconsider opinions long held, and was reaching conclusions which he learned by degrees