Sydney laughed.
"Laudatur et alget," he said. "How many stripes would it have been if I had come home disgraced?"
"The stripes would have been my portion in that case," the rector answered, with a hearty laugh. He had not been so jovial for many months.
Then Lettice came running up, and had to be told the news, and clung to Sydney's neck with kisses, which he graciously permitted rather than returned. But he was gratified by her affection, as well as by the pride and pleasure which his father took in his success, and the less discriminating, but equally warm congratulations and caresses showered upon him by his mother.
Indeed for the rest of the day, Sydney was caressed and complimented to his heart's content. He preferred the compliments to the caresses, and he was not unloving to his parents, although he repulsed Lettice when she attempted to kiss him more than once. He had come back from Cambridge with an added sense of manliness and importance, which did not sit ill upon his handsome face and the frank confidence of his manner. It was Sydney who had inherited the golden hair and regular features which, as his mother said, ought to have belonged to Lettice and not to him; but she loved him all the more dearly for his resemblance to her family and to herself. It escaped her observation that Sydney's blue-grey eyes were keener, his mouth more firmly closed and his jaw squarer than those of most boys or men, and betokened, if physiognomy goes for anything, a new departure in character and intellect from the ways in which Mrs. Campion and her family had always walked. A fair, roseate complexion, and a winning manner, served to disguise these points of difference; and Mrs. Campion had not quick sight for anything which did not lie upon the surface, in the character of those with whom she had to do.
She was usually to be found in the drawing-room—a faded, pretty woman, little over fifty years of age, but with the delicate and enfeebled air of the semi-invalid—a white shawl round her shoulders, a bit of knitting or embroidery between her incapable, uncertain fingers. Her hair was very grey, but the curliness had never gone out of it, and it sprang so crisply and picturesquely from her white, unwrinkled forehead that it seemed a pity to hide any of the pretty waves even by the crown of fine old lace which Mrs. Campion loved. She was a woman at whom no one could look without a sense of artistic satisfaction, for her face was still charming, and her dress delicately neat and becoming. As for her mental and moral qualities, she was perfectly well satisfied with them, and her husband was as satisfied as she—although from a somewhat different point of view. And as she very properly remarked, if her husband were satisfied with her, she did not know why she should be called upon to regard any adverse opinion of the outer world. At the same time she was an ardent disciple of Mrs. Grundy.
How this woman came to be the mother of a child like Lettice, it were, indeed, hard to say. Sydney was fashioned more or less after Mrs. Campion's own heart: he was brisk, practical, unimaginative—of a type that she to some extent understood; but Lettice with her large heart, her warm and passionate nature, her keen sensibilities and tender conscience, was a continual puzzle to her mother. Especially at this period of the girl's life, when new powers were developing and new instincts coming into existence—the very time when a girl most needs the help and comfort of a mother's tender comprehension—Mrs. Campion and Lettice fell hopelessly apart. Lettice's absorption in her studies did not seem right in Mrs. Campion's eyes: she longed with all her soul to set her daughter down to crewel-work and fancy knitting, and her one comfort in view of Sydney's approaching separation from his home was her hope that, when he was gone, Lettice would give up Latin and Greek and become like other girls. She was ignorantly proud of Sydney's successes: she was quite as ignorantly ashamed of Lettice's achievements in the same lines of study.
"I can never forget," she said to Lettice that evening, when the rector and his son were discussing Cambridge and examination papers in the study, while the mother and her daughter occupied the drawing-room—Lettice, indeed, wild to join her father and brother in the study and glean every possible fragment of information concerning the place which she had been taught to reverence, but far too dutiful to her mother to leave her alone when Mrs. Campion seemed inclined to talk—"I can never forget that Sydney learned his alphabet at my knee. I taught him to spell, at any rate; and if your father had not insisted on taking the teaching out of my hands when he was seven years old, I am convinced that I should have done great things with him."
"Surely he has done great things already, mamma!" Lettice said with enthusiasm.
"Oh, yes!" said Mrs. Campion with a sigh. "But I don't think your father has given quite the bias to his mind that I should have liked best. I have always hoped that he would spend his strength in the service of the Church; but——You have not heard him say much about his future career, have you, Lettice?"