“Oh yes! five times as good,—if he would but go; but he’ll not hear of it.”
“Mrs. Bowles, I am very much obliged to you for your confidence, and I feel sure that all will end happily now we have had this talk. I’ll not press further on you at present. Tom will not stir out, I suppose, till the evening.”
“Ah, sir, he seems as if he had no heart to stir out again, unless for something dreadful.”
“Courage! I will call again in the evening, and then you just take me up to Tom’s room, and leave me there to make friends with him, as I have with you. Don’t say a word about me in the meanwhile.”
“But—”
“‘But,’ Mrs. Bowles, is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. Nobody would ever love his neighbour as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said on the other side of the question.”
CHAPTER XV.
KENELM now bent his way towards the parsonage, but just as he neared its glebe-lands he met a gentleman whose dress was so evidently clerical that he stopped and said,—
“Have I the honour to address Mr. Lethbridge?”