handsome woman and fashionable withal, no doubt may have had some influence; but Sir Hugh was a man much prone to follow his own courses.  It must be presumed that Julia Brabazon had made herself agreeable in the house, and also probably useful.  She had been taken to London through two seasons, and had there held up her head among the bravest.  And she had been taken abroad—­for Sir Hugh did not love Clavering Park, except during six weeks of partridge shooting; and she had been at Newmarket with them, and at the house of a certain fast hunting duke with whom Sir Hugh was intimate; and at Brighton with her sister, when it suited Sir Hugh to remain alone at the duke’s; and then again up in London, where she finally arranged matters with Lord Ongar.  It was acknowledged by all the friends of the two families, and indeed I may say of the three families now—­among the Brabazon people, and the Clavering people, and the Courton people—­Lord Ongar’s family name was Courton—­that Julia Brabazon had been very clever.  Of her and Harry Clavering together no one had ever said a word.  If any words had been spoken between her and Hermione on the subject, the two sisters had been discreet enough to manage that they should go no further.

In those short months of Julia’s romance Sir Hugh had been away from Clavering, and Hermione had been much occupied in giving birth to an heir.  Julia had now lived past her one short spell of poetry, had written her one sonnet, and was prepared for the business of the world.

Chapter II

Harry Clavering Chooses His Profession

Harry Clavering might not be an usher, but, nevertheless, he was home for the holidays.  And who can say where the usher ends and the school-master begins?  He, perhaps, may properly be called an usher, who is hired by a private schoolmaster to assist himself in his private occupation, whereas Harry Clavering had been selected by a public body out of a hundred candidates, with much real or pretended reference to certificates of qualification.  He was certainly not an usher, as he was paid three hundred a year for his work—­which is quite beyond the mark of ushers.  So much was certain; but yet the word stuck in his throat and made him uncomfortable.  He did not like to reflect that he was home for the holidays.

But he had determined that he would never come home for the holidays again.  At Christmas he would leave the school at which he had won his appointment with so much trouble, and go into an open profession.  Indeed he had chosen his profession, and his mode of entering it.  He would become a civil engineer, and perhaps a land surveyor, and with this view he would enter himself as a pupil in the great house of Beilby & Burton.  The terms even had been settled.  He was to pay a premium of five hundred pounds and join Mr. Burton, who was settled in the town of Stratton, for twelve months before he placed himself in Mr. Beilby’s office in London.  Stratton was less than twenty miles from Clavering.  It was a comfort to him to think that he could pay this five hundred pounds out of his own earnings, without troubling his father.  It was a comfort, even though he had earned that money by “ushering” for the last two years.