The next day Mr. Horner came to apologize and explain.  He was evidently—­as I could tell from his voice, as he spoke to my lady in the next room—­extremely annoyed at her ladyship’s discovery of the education he had been giving to this boy.  My lady spoke with great authority, and with reasonable grounds of complaint.  Mr. Horner was well acquainted with her thoughts on the subject, and had acted in defiance of her wishes.  He acknowledged as much, and should on no account have done it, in any other instance, without her leave.

“Which I could never have granted you,” said my lady.

But this boy had extraordinary capabilities; would, in fact, have taught himself much that was bad, if he had not been rescued, and another direction given to his powers.  And in all Mr. Horner had done, he had had her ladyship’s service in view.  The business was getting almost beyond his power, so many letters and so much account-keeping was required by the complicated state in which things were.

Lady Ludlow felt what was coming—­a reference to the mortgage for the benefit of my lord’s Scottish estates, which, she was perfectly aware, Mr. Horner considered as having been a most unwise proceeding—­and she hastened to observe—­“All this may be very true, Mr. Horner, and I am sure I should be the last person to wish you to overwork or distress yourself; but of that we will talk another time.  What I am now anxious to remedy is, if possible, the state of this poor little Gregson’s mind.  Would not hard work in the fields be a wholesome and excellent way of enabling him to forget?”

“I was in hopes, my lady, that you would have permitted me to bring him up to act as a kind of clerk,” said Mr. Horner, jerking out his project abruptly.

“A what?” asked my lady, in infinite surprise.

“A kind of—­of assistant, in the way of copying letters and doing up accounts.  He is already an excellent penman and very quick at figures.”

“Mr. Horner,” said my lady, with dignity, “the son of a poacher and vagabond ought never to have been able to copy letters relating to the Hanbury estates; and, at any rate, he shall not.  I wonder how it is that, knowing the use he has made of his power of reading a letter, you should venture to propose such an employment for him as would require his being in your confidence, and you the trusted agent of this family.  Why, every secret (and every ancient and honourable family has its secrets, as you know, Mr. Horner) would be learnt off by heart, and repeated to the first comer!”

“I should have hoped to have trained him, my lady, to understand the rules of discretion.”

“Trained!  Train a barn-door fowl to be a pheasant, Mr. Horner!  That would be the easier task.  But you did right to speak of discretion rather than honour.  Discretion looks to the consequences of actions—­honour looks to the action itself, and is an instinct rather than a virtue.  After all, it is possible you might have trained him to be discreet.”