If the rector had been facile to deal with, Mrs. Corfield was not.  When she heard of the proposed arrangement, and that she was to lose her boy for the second time out of her daily life, and more permanently than before, her grief was as intense as if she had been told of his approaching death.  She wept bitterly, and even bent herself to entreaty; but Alick, to whom North Aston had become a dungeon of pain since Leam went, held pertinaciously to his plan—­not without sorrow, but surely without yielding.  He was fascinated by the idea of a cure where he might be sole master, not checked by rectorial ridicule when he wished to establish night schools or clothing clubs, penny savings banks, or any other of the schemes in vogue for the good of the poor; thinking too, not unwisely, that the best heal-all for his sorrow was to be found in change of scene and more arduous work together.  Also, he thought that if his vague tentative advertisements in the papers, which he dared not make too evident, had as yet brought nothing, some more satisfactory way of discovering Leam’s hiding-place might shape itself when he was alone, freer to act as he thought best.  On all of which accounts he resisted his mother’s grief, and his own at seeing her grieve, and decided on going down to Monk Grange the next day.

Had not Dr. Corfield been ailing at this time, the mother would have accompanied her son.  The possibility of damp sheets weighed heavy on her mind; and landladies who filch from the tea-caddy, with landladies’ girls, pert and familiar, preparing insidious gruel and seductive cups of coffee, were the lions which her imagination conjured up as prowling for her Alick through the fastnesses of Monk Grange.  Circumstances, however, were stronger than her desire; and, happily for Alick, she was perforce obliged to remain at home while her darling went out from the paternal nest to shake those limp wings of his, and bear himself up unassisted in a new atmosphere in the best way he could.

It was on the cold and rainy evening of a cold and rainy summer’s day that Alick arrived at Monk Grange—­an evening without a sunset or a moon, stars or a landscape; painful, mournful, as those who dwell in the North Country know only too well as the tears on its face of beauty.  He had driven in a crazy old gig from Wigton, and the nine miles which lay between that not too brilliant town and the desolate fell-side hamlet which he had been so fain to make his own spiritual domain had not been such as disposed him to a cheerful view of things.  The rain had fallen in a steady, pitiless downpour, which seemed to soak through every outer covering and to penetrate the very flesh and marrow of the tired traveler as it pattered noisily on the umbrella and streamed over the leather apron; and the splash of the horse’s hoofs through the liquid mud and broad tracts of standing water was as dreary as the “splash, splash” of Buerger’s ballad.  And when all this was over, and they drew up at the