‘And I never was so tired of a man in my life.’

’Then you prefer the Crawleys, I suppose.  This is what you get from Eleanor’s teaching.’  Eleanor was the dean’s wife, and Mrs Grantly’s younger sister.  ’It has always been a sorrow to me that I ever brought Arabin into the diocese.’

’I never asked you to bring him, archdeacon.  But nobody was so glad as you when he proposed to Eleanor.’

’Well, the long and the short of it is this, I shall tell Henry tonight that if he makes a fool of himself with this girl, he must not look to me any longer for an income.  He has about six thousand a year of his own, and if he chooses to throw himself away, he had better go and live in the south of France, or in Canada, or where he pleases.  He shan’t come here.’

‘I hope he won’t marry the girl, with all my heart,’ said Mrs Grantly.

‘He had better not.  By heavens, he had better not!’

‘But if he does, you’ll be the first to forgive him.’

On hearing this the archdeacon slammed the door, and retired to his own washing apparatus.  At the present moment he was very angry with his wife, but then he was so accustomed to such anger, and was so well aware that it in truth meant nothing, that it did not make him unhappy.  The archdeacon and Mrs Grantly had now been man and wife for more than quarter of a century and had never in truth quarrelled.  He had the most profound respect for her judgment, and the most implicit reliance on her conduct.  She had never yet offended him, or caused him to repent the hour in which he had made her Mrs Grantly.  But she had come to understand that she might use a woman’s privilege with her tongue; and she used it—­not altogether to his comfort.  On the present occasion he was the more annoyed because he felt that she might be right.  ’It would be a positive disgrace, and I never would see him again,’ he said to himself.  And yet as he said it, he knew that he would not have the strength of character to carry him through a prolonged quarrel with his son.  ‘I never would see her—­never, never!’ he said to himself.  ’And then such an opening as he might have in his sister’s house!’

Major Grantly had been a successful man in life—­with the one exception of having lost the mother of his child within a twelve-month of his marriage and within a few hours of that child’s birth.  He had served in India as a very young man, and had been decorated with the Victoria Cross.  Then he had married a lady with some money, and had left the active service of the army, with the concurring advice of his own family and that of his wife.  He had taken a small place in his father’s county, but the wife for whose comfort he had taken it had died before she was permitted to see it.  Nevertheless he had gone to reside there, hunting a good deal and farming a little, making himself popular in the district, and keeping up the good name of Grantly in a successful way, till—­alas!,—­it had seemed