to come unless to those who either are born with interest, or who marry in order to get it?  Ernest’s father and mother have no interest, and if they had they would not use it.  I suppose they will make him a clergyman, or try to do so—­perhaps it is the best thing to do with him, for he could buy a living with the money his grandfather left him, but there is no knowing what the boy will think of it when the time comes, and for aught we know he may insist on going to the backwoods of America, as so many other young men are doing now.” . . .  But, anyway, he would like making an organ, and this could do him no harm, so the sooner he began the better.

Alethea thought it would save trouble in the end if she told her brother and sister-in-law of this scheme.  “I do not suppose,” she wrote, “that Dr Skinner will approve very cordially of my attempt to introduce organ-building into the curriculum of Roughborough, but I will see what I can do with him, for I have set my heart on owning an organ built by Ernest’s own hands, which he may play on as much as he likes while it remains in my house and which I will lend him permanently as soon as he gets one of his own, but which is to be my property for the present, inasmuch as I mean to pay for it.”  This was put in to make it plain to Theobald and Christina that they should not be out of pocket in the matter.

If Alethea had been as poor as the Misses Allaby, the reader may guess what Ernest’s papa and mamma would have said to this proposal; but then, if she had been as poor as they, she would never have made it.  They did not like Ernest’s getting more and more into his aunt’s good books, still it was perhaps better that he should do so than that she should be driven back upon the John Pontifexes.  The only thing, said Theobald, which made him hesitate, was that the boy might be thrown with low associates later on if he were to be encouraged in his taste for music—­a taste which Theobald had always disliked.  He had observed with regret that Ernest had ere now shown rather a hankering after low company, and he might make acquaintance with those who would corrupt his innocence.  Christina shuddered at this, but when they had aired their scruples sufficiently they felt (and when people begin to “feel,” they are invariably going to take what they believe to be the more worldly course) that to oppose Alethea’s proposal would be injuring their son’s prospects more than was right, so they consented, but not too graciously.

After a time, however, Christina got used to the idea, and then considerations occurred to her which made her throw herself into it with characteristic ardour.  If Miss Pontifex had been a railway stock she might have been said to have been buoyant in the Battersby market for some few days; buoyant for long together she could never be, still for a time there really was an upward movement.  Christina’s mind wandered to the organ itself; she seemed to have made