“Ouf!  No, he is booked for our grammar school.”

“The grammar school was not good for any of you, except the one whom nothing hurt.”

“It is very different now.  I have full confidence in the head, and the tone is improved throughout.  Till my boys are ready for a public school I had rather they were among our own people.  No, Cherry, I can’t do it, I can’t give up the delight of him yet; no, I can’t, nor lose his little voice out of the choir, and have his music spoilt.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“I don’t think I spoil him.  I really have flogged him once,” said Lance, half wistfully, half playfully.

“How proud you are of it.”

“It was for maltreating little Joan Vanderkist, though if it had only been her brother, I should have said, ‘Go it, boys.’  It was not till afterwards that it turned out that Joan was too loyal not to bear the penalty of having tied our little Audrey into a chair to be pelted with horse-chestnuts.”

“At Adrian’s bidding?”

“Of course.  I fancy the Harewood boys set him on.  And what I thought of was sending Adrian here to be schooled at Mrs. Edgar’s, boarded by you, mothered by Anna, and altogether saved from being made utterly detestable, as he will inevitably be if he remains to tyrannize over Vale Leston.”

“Would his mother consent?”

“You know he is entirely in Clement’s power.”

“It would only be another worry for Clement.”

“He need not have much of him, and I believe he would prefer to have him under his own eye; and Anna will think it bliss to have him, though what it may prove is another question.  She will keep you from being too much bothered.”

“My dear Lance, will you never understand, that as furze and thistles are to a donkey, so are shabbiness and bother to me-—a native element?”

In the morning Clement, raised on his pillows in bed, showed himself highly grateful for the proposal about his youngest ward.

“It is very good of you, Cherry,” he said.  “That poor boy has been very much on my mind.  This is the way to profit by my enforced leisure.”

“That’s the way to make me dread him.  You were to lie fallow.”

“Not exactly.  I have thirteen or fourteen years’ reading and thinking to make up.  I have done no more than get up a thing cursorily since I left Vale Leston.”

“You are welcome to read and think, provided it is nothing more recent than St. Chrysostom.”

“So here is the letter to Alda,” giving it to her open.

“Short and to the purpose,” she said.

“Alda submits to the inevitable,” he said.  “Don’t appear as if she had a choice.”

“Only mention the alleviations.  No, you are not to get up yet.  There’s no place for you to sit in, and the east wind is not greatly mitigated by the sea air.  Shall I send Anna to read to you?”

“In half-an-hour, if she is ready then; meantime, those two books, if you please.”