One afternoon, some three weeks after the Squire’s funeral, he happened to return to the house for a tracing which he had forgotten, and found Honoria seated in the kitchen and talking with his father and mother.  She was dressed in black, of course, and either this or the solemnity of her visit gave her quite a grown-up look.  But, to be sure, she was mistress of Tredinnis now, and a child no longer.

Taffy guessed the meaning of her visit at once.  And no doubt this act of formal reconciliation between Tredinnis House and the Parsonage had cost her some nervousness.  As Taffy entered his parents stood up and seemed just as awkward as their visitor.  “Another time, perhaps,” he heard his father say.  Honoria rose almost at once, and would not stay to drink tea, though Humility pressed her.

“I suppose,” said Taffy next day, looking up from his Virgil, “I suppose Miss Honoria wants to make friends now and help on the restoration?”

Mr. Raymond, who was on his knees fastening a loose hinge in a pew-door, took a screw from between his lips.

“Yes, she proposed that.”

“It must be splendid for you, dad!”

“I don’t quite see,” answered Mr. Raymond, with his head well inside the pew.

Taffy stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and took a turn up and down the aisle.

“Why,” said he, coming to a halt, “it means that you have won.  It’s victory, dad, and I call it glorious!” His lip trembled.  He wanted to put a hand on his father’s shoulder; but his abominable shyness stood between.

“We won long ago, my boy.”  And Mr. Raymond wheeled round on his knees, pushed up his spectacles, and quoted the famous lines, very solemnly and slowly: 

     “’And not by eastern windows only,
        When daylight comes, comes in the light;
       In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! 
        But westward, look, the land is bright!’”

“I see,” Taffy nodded.  “And—­I say, that’s jolly.  Who wrote it?”

“A man I used to see in the streets of Oxford and always turned to stare after:  a man with big ugly shaped feet and the face of a god—­a young tormented god.  Those were days when young men’s thoughts tormented them.  Taffy,” he asked abruptly, “should you like to go to Oxford?”

“Don’t, father!” The boy bit his lip to keep back the tears.  “Talk of something else—­something cheerful.  It has been a splendid fight, just splendid!  And now it’s over I’m almost sorry.”

“What is over?”

“Well, I suppose—­now that Honoria wants to help—­we can hire workmen and have the whole job finished in a month, or two at farthest:  and you—­”

Mr. Raymond stood up, and leaning against a bench-end, examined the thread of the screw between his fingers.