He had had three sons—­Maurice, a fine, high-spirited young fellow; Alfred, good-looking and good-tempered, but indolent; James, a slim, sickly lad, who inherited from his mother a fatal tendency to decline.  She died while he was a baby, and he was petted from that time forward.  Godfrey Thorne was well satisfied with Maurice, but was always at war with his second son, who would not take orders and hold the family living.  They argued the matter till it was too late for Alfred to go into the army, the only career for which he had expressed any desire; and then Mr. Thorne found himself face to face with a gentle and lazy resistance which threatened to be a match for his own hard obstinacy.  Alfred didn’t mind being a farmer.  But his father was troubled about the necessary capital, and doubted his son’s success:  “You will go on after a fashion for a few years, and then all the money will have slipped through your fingers.  You know nothing of farming.”—­“That’s true,” said Alfred.—­“And you are much too lazy to learn.”—­“That’s very likely,” said the young man.  So Mr. Thorne looked about him for some more eligible opening for his troublesome son; and Alfred meanwhile, with his handsome face and honest smile, was busy making love to Sarah Percival, the rector’s daughter.

The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the squire’s ears.  When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily enough.  He loved Miss Percival, and she didn’t mind waiting.  Mr. Thorne was not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse with the rector was rather stormy and uncertain, they happened to be on tolerable terms just then.  Sarah was an only child, and would have a little money at Mr. Percival’s death, and Alfred was much more submissive and anxious to please his father under these altered circumstances.  The young people were not to consider themselves engaged, Miss Percival being only eighteen and Alfred one-and-twenty.  But if they were of the same mind later, when the latter should be in a position to marry, it was understood that neither his father nor Mr. Percival would oppose it.

Unluckily, a parochial question arose near Christmas-time, and the squire and the clergyman took different views of it.  Mr. Thorne went about the house with brows like a thunder-cloud, and never opened his lips to Alfred except to abuse the rector.  “You’ll have to choose between old Percival and me one of these days,” he said more than once.  “You’d better be making up your mind:  it will save time.”  Alfred was silent.  When the strife was at its height Maurice was drowned while skating.