stopping in the house over his books.  He would saunter out on the sunny side of the house in a manner that the squire considered as both indolent and unmanly.  Yet if there was a prospect of his leaving home, which he did pretty often about this time, he was seized with a hectic energy:  the clouds in the sky, the easterly wind, the dampness of the air, were nothing to him then; and as the squire did not know the real secret cause of this anxiety to be gone, he took it into his head that it arose from Osborne’s dislike to Hamley and to the monotony of his father’s society.

‘It was a mistake,’ thought the squire.  ’I see it now.  I was never great at making friends myself.  I always thought those Oxford and Cambridge men turned up their noses at me for a country booby, and I’d get the start and have none o’ them.  But when the boys went to Rugby and Cambridge, I should ha’ let them have had their own friends about ‘em, even though they might ha’ looked down on me; it was the worst they could ha’ done to me, and now what few friends I had have fallen off from me, by death or somehow, and it is but dreary work for a young man, I grant it.  But he might try not to show it so plain to me as he does.  I’m getting case-hardened, but it does cut me to the quick sometimes—­it does.  And he so fond of his dad as he was once!  If I can but get the land drained I’ll make him an allowance, and let him go to London, or where he likes.  Maybe he’ll do better this time, or maybe he’ll go to the dogs altogether; but perhaps it will make him think a bit kindly of the old father at home—­I should like him to do that, I should!’

It is possible that Osborne might have been induced to tell his father of his marriage during their long tete-a-tete intercourse, if the squire, in an unlucky moment, had not given him his confidence about Roger’s engagement with Cynthia.  It was on one wet Sunday afternoon, when the father and son were sitting together in the large empty drawing-room.  Osborne had not been to church in the morning; the squire had, and he was now trying hard to read one of Blair’s sermons.  They had dined early; they always did on Sundays; and either that, or the sermon, or the hopeless wetness of the day, made the afternoon seem interminably long to the squire.  He had certain unwritten rules for the regulation of his conduct on Sundays.  Cold meat, sermon-reading, no smoking till after evening prayers, as little thought as possible as to the state of the land and the condition of the crops, and as much respectable sitting-indoors in his best clothes as was consistent with going to church twice a day, and saying the responses louder than the clerk.  To-day it had rained so unceasingly that he had remitted the afternoon church; but oh, even with the luxury of a nap, how long it seemed before he saw the Hall servants trudging homewards, along the field-path, a covey of umbrellas!  He had been standing at the window for the last half-hour,