right.  But the very talking about it tires me, I know, and I can’t think how you have stood it all.  Come out and see how pretty the flowers are looking in the south garden.  I’ve made them sow all the seeds you like; and I went over to Hollingford nursery to buy the cuttings of the plants you admired last year.  A breath of fresh air will clear my brain after listening to all this talk about the whirl of London, which is like to have turned me giddy.’

Mrs. Hamley was a great reader, and had considerable literary taste.  She was gentle and sentimental; tender and good.  She gave up her visits to London; she gave up her sociable pleasure in the company of her fellows in education and position.  Her husband, owing to the deficiencies of his early years, disliked associating with those to whom he ought to have been an equal; he was too proud to mingle with his inferiors.  He loved his wife all the more dearly for her sacrifices for him; but, deprived of all her strong interests, she sank into ill-health; nothing definite; only she never was well.  Perhaps if she had had a daughter it would have been better for her; but her two children were boys, and their father, anxious to give them the advantages of which he himself had suffered the deprivation, sent the lads very early to a preparatory school.  They were to go on to Rugby and Cambridge; the idea of Oxford was hereditarily distasteful in the Hamley family.  Osborne, the eldest—­so called after his mother’s maiden name—­was full of tastes, and had some talent.  His appearance had all the grace and refinement of his mother’s.  He was sweet-tempered and affectionate, almost as demonstrative as a girl.  He did well at school, carrying away many prizes; and was, in a word, the pride and delight of both father and mother; the confidential friend of the latter, in default of any other.  Roger was two years younger than Osborne; clumsy and heavily built, like his father; his face was square, and the expression grave, and rather immobile.  He was good, but dull, his schoolmasters said.  He won no prizes, but brought home a favourable report of his conduct.  When he caressed his mother, she used laughingly to allude to the fable of the lap-dog and the donkey; so thereafter he left off all personal demonstration of affection.  It was a great question as to whether he was to follow his brother to college after he left Rugby.  Mrs. Hamley thought it would be rather a throwing away of money, as he was so little likely to distinguish himself in intellectual pursuits; anything practical—­such as a civil engineer—­would be more the line of life for him.  She thought that it would be too mortifying for him to go to the same college and university as his brother, who was sure to distinguish himself—­and, to be repeatedly plucked, to come away wooden-spoon at last.  But his father persevered doggedly, as was his wont, in his intention of giving both his sons the same education; they should both have the advantages of