The next question that pressed assumed an air of paramount importance.  He had asked Alec to enter some honourable mercantile profession.  He had pressed this in the first interview, when the hot-tempered young man had left him in a rage.  He had argued the point in subsequent letters; he had even offered his own share of their inheritance as additional capital.  He felt that he deserved an answer to this offer, and believed that his happiness depended upon Alec’s acceding to the proposed change of his life-plan.  His mind full of this secondary subject, he perused the sheets of the letter with singular impatience and distaste.  Any man might, in the most favourable circumstances, have been excused for experiencing impatience at having so wild a tale foisted in brief confusion upon his credulity; in the mood of his present circumstance the elder Trenholme refolded the letter, using within himself the strongest language in his vocabulary.

Robert Trenholme was not a happy man just now.  Since he had last seen Alec a change had come to him which made this matter of the other’s calling of warmer interest than it had been.  Then his early love for Sophia Rexford had been a memory and a far, half-formed hope; now it had been roused again to be a true, steady flame, an ever-present influence.  His one desire now was to win her affection.  He would not be afraid then to tell her all that there was to tell of himself, and let her love decide.  He did not feel that he should wrong her in this.  At present he had everything to give, she everything to receive, except the possession of gentle blood, which would apparently be her only dowry.  The girl he could not once have dared to address was now working servantless in her father’s kitchen; he knew that it was no light drudgery; and he could offer her a comparatively luxurious home, and a name that had attracted to itself no small honour.  He had a nice appreciation for what is called position, and the belief that their mutual positions had changed was very sweet to him.  All his mind expanded in this thought, as the nerves of the opium-eater to the influence of his drug; it soothed him when he was weary; it consoled him when he was vexed; it had come to him as an unexpected, unsought good, like a blessing direct from heaven.

This was as things now were; but if his brother adhered to his purpose of establishing himself in his business in the same country, that would make a difference—­a difference that it was hard, perhaps, for a thoughtful man to put into words, but which was still harder to wipe away by any sophistry of words.  Robert Trenholme may have been wise, or he may have been foolish, but he estimated this difference as great.  Should Alec persist in this thing, it would, in the first place, endanger the success of his school, or alter his relation to that school; in the second, it would make him more unworthy in the eyes of all Sophia’s well-born relatives.  While he remained in suspense,