what had so violently the disapprobation of the Nonconformists....  There was no particular force in the objections of these latter in that district, as the Church school, the only one for miles, would not be large or convenient enough to come under the State aid of the Bill, so almost from the first it was a matter of building one of the new Board schools, where the undenominational system abhorred by Boase would be all that would hold sway.

Ishmael’s first definite outward movement came about on an evening when Boase came up to the Manor to see him and the Flynns, who were staying with him at the time.  Nicky was then three years old, and a daily growing delight to Ishmael, but the Parson was not without a guileful plot to wean him somewhat from that allegiance.  He had begun to consider—­probably because Daniel Flynn, deeply as he disagreed from him in many respects, had stirred him to the wider issues—­that Ishmael must be made to take a hand in other affairs than the ordering of his estate and the upbringing of his son.  He had watched with alarm the increasing inwardness of the man he loved, to him always the boy he remembered—­an inwardness not towards egoism, for that Ishmael’s distrust of individualism, would always prevent, but towards a vague Quietism that enwrapped him more and more.  His son, deeply as he engrossed him, rather increased this trend than otherwise, and Boase, casting about for other influences, had irresistibly thought of Flynn.

Daniel Flynn was a living mass of contradictions.  An Irishman and a disciple of the O’Connell tradition, he was yet—­though the word had not then been coined—­an Imperialist, for his Canadian sympathies were strong, and he knew that not yet could the Colonies be entirely cut loose from the Mother Country.  A Liberal, he had been an ardent supporter of the Dominion scheme evolved under the Tory Government of Derby.  He revered the memory of Durham, that large-ideaed, generous-hearted, spectacular nobleman whose crime had been to hold by the spirit rather than by the letter, and whom Dan declared to be the father not only of Canada, but of the modern Colonial system.  Though he held the Crimean War to be an error of policy and the Chinese War of ’57 to be an abomination, he never joined with those of Palmerston’s detractors who accused him of being too French in his sympathies.  He inveighed against all wars in the abstract, yet raged at the loyalty of O’Connell, which, by stopping short at the use of rebellious force, had alienated his adherents; and he himself had borne arms for Garibaldi.  He had been among the most passionate critics of the manner in which the trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O’Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place.  He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries.  He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted.  He was an Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing town in the Midlands.