“I do not wish to write unkindly, nothing can be farther from my real feelings towards you, but there is often more kindness in plain speaking than in any amount of soft words which can end in no substantial performance.  Of course, I bear in mind that you are of age, and can therefore please yourself, but if you choose to claim the strict letter of the law, and act without consideration for your father’s feelings, you must not be surprised if you one day find that I have claimed a like liberty for myself.—­Believe me, your affectionate father, G. PONTIFEX.”

I found this letter along with those already given and a few more which I need not give, but throughout which the same tone prevails, and in all of which there is the more or less obvious shake of the will near the end of the letter.  Remembering Theobald’s general dumbness concerning his father for the many years I knew him after his father’s death, there was an eloquence in the preservation of the letters and in their endorsement “Letters from my father,” which seemed to have with it some faint odour of health and nature.

Theobald did not show his father’s letter to Christina, nor, indeed, I believe to anyone.  He was by nature secretive, and had been repressed too much and too early to be capable of railing or blowing off steam where his father was concerned.  His sense of wrong was still inarticulate, felt as a dull dead weight ever present day by day, and if he woke at night-time still continually present, but he hardly knew what it was.  I was about the closest friend he had, and I saw but little of him, for I could not get on with him for long together.  He said I had no reverence; whereas I thought that I had plenty of reverence for what deserved to be revered, but that the gods which he deemed golden were in reality made of baser metal.  He never, as I have said, complained of his father to me, and his only other friends were, like himself, staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies, and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of insubordination to parents—­good young men, in fact—­and one cannot blow off steam to a good young man.

When Christina was informed by her lover of his father’s opposition, and of the time which must probably elapse before they could be married, she offered—­with how much sincerity I know not—­to set him free from his engagement; but Theobald declined to be released—­“not at least,” as he said, “at present.”  Christina and Mrs Allaby knew they could manage him, and on this not very satisfactory footing the engagement was continued.

His engagement and his refusal to be released at once raised Theobald in his own good opinion.  Dull as he was, he had no small share of quiet self-approbation.  He admired himself for his University distinction, for the purity of his life (I said of him once that if he had only a better temper he would be as innocent as a new-laid egg) and for his unimpeachable integrity in money matters.  He did not despair of advancement in the Church when he had once got a living, and of course it was within the bounds of possibility that he might one day become a Bishop, and Christina said she felt convinced that this would ultimately be the case.