Then came the memorable interview with his guardian on his twenty-first birthday.  Harvey flinched and grew hot in thinking of it.  What an ungrateful cur!  What a self-sufficient young idiot!  The Doctor had borne so kindly with his follies and vices, had taken so much trouble for his good, was it not the man’s right and duty to speak grave words of counsel on such an occasion as this?  But to counsel Mr. Harvey Rolfe was to be guilty of gross impertinence.  With lofty spirit the young gentleman proclaimed that he must no longer be treated as a school-boy!  Whereupon the Doctor lost his temper, and spoke with a particularly strong Hibernian accent —­ spoke words which to this moment stung the hearer’s memory.  He saw himself marching from the room —­ that room yonder, on the ground-floor.  It was some small consolation to remember that he had been drinking steadily for a week before that happened.  Indeed, he could recall no scene quite so discreditable throughout the course of his insensate youth.

Well, he had something like two thousand pounds.  Whether he had looked for more or less he hardly knew, or whether he had looked for anything at all.  At one-and-twenty he was the merest child in matters of the world.  Surely something must have arrested the natural development of his common-sense.  Even in another ten years he was scarcely on a level, as regards practical intelligence, with the ordinary lad who is leaving school.

He at once threw up his medical studies, which had grown hateful to him.  He took his first taste of foreign travel.  He extended his reading and his knowledge of languages.  And insensibly a couple of years went by.

The possession of money had done him good.  It clarified his passions, or tended that way.  A self-respect, which differed appreciably from what he had formerly understood by that term, began to guard him against grossness; together with it there developed in him a new social pride which made him desire the acquaintance of well-bred people.  Though he had no longer any communication with the good old Doctor, Amy frequently wrote to him, and in one of her letters she begged him to call on a family in London, one of whose younger members lived at Greystone and was Amy’s friend.  After much delay, he overcame his bashfulness, and called upon the worthy people —­ tailored as became a gentleman at large.  The acquaintance led to others; in a short time he was on pleasant terms with several well-to-do families.  He might have suspected —­ but at the time, of course, did not —­ that Dr Harvey’s kindly influence had something to do with his reception in these houses.  Self-centred, but painfully self-distrustful, he struggled to overcome his natural defects of manner.  Possibly with some success; for did not Lily Burton, who at first so piqued him by her critical smile, come to show him tolerance, friendliness, gracious interest?