James and Isabel were not merciful to their uncle when they could speak of him without restraint; and began to conjecture his intentions with regard to them.

‘You don’t wish to become an appendage to Cheveleigh?’ said James, fondly.

‘I! who never knew happiness till I came here!’

‘I do not know what my uncle may propose,’ said James, ’but I know you coincide in my determination that he shall never interfere with the duties of my office.’

‘You do not imagine that he wishes it?’

’I know he wishes I were not in Holy Orders.  I knew he disliked it at the time of my ordination; but if he wished me to act according to his views, he should have given himself the right to dictate.’

‘By not neglecting you all your youth.’

’Not that I regret or resent what concerns myself; but it was his leaving me a burden on my grandmother that drove me to become a clergyman, and a consistent one I will be, not an idle heir-apparent to this estate, receiving it as his gift, not my own birthright.’

‘An idle clergyman!  Never! never!’ cried Isabel.  ’I should not believe it was you!  And the school—­you could not leave it just as your plans are working, and the boys improving?’

’Certainly not; it would be fatal to abandon it to that stick, Powell.  Ah!  Isabel,’ as he looked at her beautiful countenance, ’how I pity the man who has not a high-minded wife!  Suppose you came begging and imploring me not to give any umbrage to the man, because you so doted upon diamonds.’

’The less merit when one has learnt that they are very cold hard stones,’ said Isabel, smiling.

Isabel was a high-minded wife, but she would have been a still better one if her loving admiration had allowed her to soften James, or to question whether pride and rancour did not lurk unperceived in the midst of the really high and sound motives that prompted him.

While their grandmother could only see Oliver on the best side, James and Isabel could only see him on the worst, and lost the greatness of the design in the mercenary habits that exclusive perseverance in it had produced.  It had been a false greatness, but they could not grant the elevation of mind that had originally conceived it.

The following day was Sunday, and nothing worse took place than little skirmishes, in which the uncle and nephew’s retort and rejoinder were so drolly similar, that Clara found herself thinking of Miss Faithfull’s two sandy cats over a mouse; but she kept her simile to herself, finding that Isabel regarded the faintest, gentlest comparison of the two gentlemen almost as an affront.  All actual debate was staved off by Mrs. Frost’s entreaty that business discussion should be deferred.  ‘Humph!’ said Oliver, ’you reign here, ma’am, but that’s not the way we get on at Lima.’

‘I dare say,’ said James.

Mrs. Frost’s joy was still undimmed.  It was almost a trance of gladness, trembling in her smile, and overflowing in her eye, at every congratulation and squeeze of the hand from her friends.