But he must go to Plumstead before he could go to Allington.  He was engaged to spend Christmas there, and must go now at once.  There was not time for the journey to Allington before he was due at Plumstead.  And, moreover, though he could not bring himself to resolve that he would tell his father what he was going to do;—­’It would seem as though I were asking his leave!’ he said to himself;—­he thought he would make a clean breast of it to his mother.  It made him sad to think that he should cut the rope which fastened his own boat among the other boats in the home harbour at Plumstead, and that he should go out all alone into strange waters—­turned adrift altogether, as it were, from the Grantly fleet.  If he could only get the promise of his mother’s sympathy for Grace it would be something.  He understood—­no one better than he—­the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as his father.  And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring.  He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter of an earl, and who was already mentioned as a candidate for high places.  How his sister was the wife of a marquis, and a leader in the fashionable world, the reader already knows.  The archdeacon himself was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a bishop; and Mrs Grantly, though there was left about her something of an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been hers before the stream of her days had run to gold, yet she, too, had taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of those who construe literally that passage of scripture which tells of the camel and the needle’s eye.  Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew himself to be his mother’s favourite child—­knew himself to have become so since something of a coolness had grown up between her and her daughter.  The augustness of the daughter had done much to reproduce the old freshness of which I spoke of in the mother’s heart, and had specially endeared to her the son, who, of all her children, was the least subject to the family’s failing.  The clergyman, Charles Grantly—­he who had married the Lady Anne—­was his father’s darling in these days.  The old archdeacon would go up to London and be quite happy in his son’s house.  He met there the men whom he loved to meet, and heard the talk which he loved to hear.  It was very fine, having the Marquis of Hartletop for his son-in-law, but he had never cared to be much at Lady Hartletop’s house.  Indeed, the archdeacon cared to be in no house in which those around him were supposed to be bigger than himself.  Such was the little family fleet from which Henry Grantly was now proposing to sail alone with his little boat—­taking Grace Crawley with him at the helm.  ‘My father is a just man at the bottom,’ he said to himself, ‘and though he may not forgive me, he will not punish Edith.’