In the church of the Insurgents there are many orders.  To rise to the supreme passion of revolt, two conditions are indispensable:  to possess the heart of a poet, and to be subdued by poverty to the yoke of ignoble labour.  But many who fall short of the priesthood have yet a share of the true spirit, bestowed upon them by circumstances of birth and education, developed here and there by the experience of life, yet rigidly limited in the upshot by the control of material ease, the fatal lordship of the comfortable commonplace.  Of such was Hubert Eldon.  In him, despite his birth and breeding, there came to the surface a rich vein of independence, obscurely traceable, no doubt, in the characters of certain of his ancestors, appearing at length where nineteenth-century influences had thinned the detritus of convention and class prejudice.  His nature abounded in contradictions, and as yet self-study—­in itself the note of a mind striving for emancipation—­had done little for him beyond making clear the manifold difficulties strewn in his path of progress.

You know already that it was no vulgar instinct of sensuality which had made severance between him and the respectable traditions of his family.  Observant friends naturally cast him in the category of young men whom the prospect of a fortune seduces to a life of riot; his mother had no means of forming a more accurate judgment.  Mr. Wyvern alone had seen beneath the surface, aided by a liberal study of the world, and no doubt also by that personal sympathy which is so important an ally of charity and truth.  Mr. Wyvern’s early life had not been in smooth waters; in him too revolt was native, tempered also by spiritual influences of the most opposite kind.  He felt a deep interest in the young man, and desired to keep him in view.  It was the first promise of friendship that had been held out to Hubert, who already suffered from a sense of isolation, and was wondering in what class of society he would have to look for his kith and kin.  Since boyhood he had drawn apart to a great extent from the companionships which most readily offered.  The turn taken by the circumstances of his family affected the pride which was one of his strongest characteristics; his house had fallen, and it seemed to him that a good deal of pity, if not of contempt, mingled with his reception by the more fortunate of his own standing.  He had never overcome a natural hostility to old Mr. Mutimer:  the bourgeois virtues of the worthy ironmaster rather irritated than attracted him, and he suffered intensely in the thought that his mother brought herself to close friendship with one so much her inferior just for the sake of her son’s future.  In this matter he judged with tolerable accuracy.  Mrs. Eldon, finding in the old man a certain unexpected refinement over and above his goodness of heart, consciously or unconsciously encouraged herself in idealising him, that the way of interest might approach as nearly as might be to