The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby could not have been at home.  “Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said he was not at home,” the boy replied, producing an odd ring in the ear by his repetition of “not at home” in the same voice as the apology, plainly innocent of malice.  Vernon told Laetitia, however, that the boy never asked an explanation of Sir Willoughby.

Unlike the horse of the adage, it was easier to compel young Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to the brink.  His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed.  He was whistling at the cook’s windows after a day of wicked truancy, on an April night, and reported adventures over the supper supplied to him.  Laetitia entered the kitchen with a reproving forefinger.  He jumped to kiss her, and went on chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had seen Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady.  The impossibility that the boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the road in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of birds’ eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head, with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths; all very circumstantial.  Still, in spite of his tea at the farm, and ride back by rail at the gentleman’s expense, the tale seemed fictitious to Laetitia until Crossjay related how that he had stood to salute on the road to the railway, and taken off his cap to Sir Willoughby, and Sir Willoughby had passed him, not noticing him, though the young lady did, and looked back and nodded.  The hue of truth was in that picture.

Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing over our bright ideal planet.  It will not seem the planet’s fault, but truth’s.  Reality is the offender; delusion our treasure that we are robbed of.  Then begins with us the term of wilful delusion, and its necessary accompaniment of the disgust of reality; exhausting the heart much more than patient endurance of starvation.

Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood; the hedgeways twittered, the tree-tops cawed.  Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was loud on the subject:  “Patterne is to have a mistress at last, you say?  But there never was a doubt of his marrying—­he must marry; and, so long as he does not marry a foreign woman, we have no cause to complain.  He met her at Cherriton.  Both were struck at the same moment.  Her father is, I hear, some sort of learned man; money; no land.  No house either, I believe.  People who spend half their time on the Continent.  They are now for a year at Upton Park.  The very girl to settle down and entertain when she does think of settling.  Eighteen, perfect manners; you need not ask if a beauty.  Sir Willoughby will have