Sir Willoughby intensified his imagination to conceive more:  he could not, or could not express it, and pursued:  “But what is this talk of Vernon’s leaving me?  He cannot leave.  He has barely a hundred a year of his own.  You see, I consider him.  I do not speak of the ingratitude of the wish to leave.  You know, my dear, I have a deadly abhorrence of partings and such like.  As far as I can, I surround myself with healthy people specially to guard myself from having my feelings wrung; and excepting Miss Dale, whom you like—­my darling does like her?”—­the answer satisfied him; “with that one exception, I am not aware of a case that threatens to torment me.  And here is a man, under no compulsion, talking of leaving the Hall!  In the name of goodness, why?  But why?  Am I to imagine that the sight of perfect felicity distresses him?  We are told that the world is ‘desperately wicked’.  I do not like to think it of my friends; yet otherwise their conduct is often hard to account for.”

“If it were true, you would not punish Crossjay?” Clara feebly interposed.

“I should certainly take Crossjay and make a man of him after my own model, my dear.  But who spoke to you of this?”

“Mr. Whitford himself.  And let me give you my opinion, Willoughby, that he will take Crossjay with him rather than leave him, if there is a fear of the boy’s missing his chance of the navy.”

“Marines appear to be in the ascendant,” said Sir Willoughby, astonished at the locution and pleading in the interests of a son of one.  “Then Crossjay he must take.  I cannot accept half the boy.  I am,” he laughed, “the legitimate claimant in the application for judgement before the wise king.  Besides, the boy has a dose of my blood in him; he has none of Vernon’s, not one drop.”

“Ah!”

“You see, my love?”

“Oh, I do see; yes.”

“I put forth no pretensions to perfection,” Sir Willoughby continued.  “I can bear a considerable amount of provocation; still I can be offended, and I am unforgiving when I have been offended.  Speak to Vernon, if a natural occasion should spring up.  I shall, of course, have to speak to him.  You may, Clara, have observed a man who passed me on the road as we were cantering home, without a hint of a touch to his hat.  That man is a tenant of mine, farming six hundred acres, Hoppner by name:  a man bound to remember that I have, independently of my position, obliged him frequently.  His lease of my ground has five years to run.  I must say I detest the churlishness of our country population, and where it comes across me I chastise it.  Vernon is a different matter:  he will only require to be spoken to.  One would fancy the old fellow laboured now and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary.  My love,” he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, “you are tired?”

“I am very tired to-day,” said Clara.

His arm was offered.  She laid two fingers on it, and they dropped when he attempted to press them to his rib.