'Surely we could live at small expense here! We have all been used to frugality.'
'Yes, and I have seen that stinting has not a happy effect. In such a house as this, we cannot live as we have done at home. We can do without display, but plain hospitality we must have, and debt would be worse than trade. Ah, Clem! the old home has made you the exclusive aristocrat again! Recollect, such a restitution must involve sacrifice of some sort. We must have the Underwood "rood" some way or other. You are ready enough to let it be in money and luxury, but can't you let it be in—what shall I call it—consideration? That is, if it does make any difference, or if we find it out.'
'You'll find it out fast enough from the Miss Hepburns,' muttered Clement.
Felix laughed 'Poor Clem! Hepburns first and last! I'm sorry to disgrace you!'
But during that laugh Clement had bethought himself. 'I beg your pardon, Felix; you are a lesson to me. I did not know that it was the world that was arguing in me. To go on working in trade in order to make restitution to the Church is heroism I did not grasp at first.'
'Perhaps,' said Felix more lightly, 'it is all reluctance to give up being somebody at Bexley for the sake of being nobody in Ewshire. Don't look so unhappy, old fellow; University men and beneficed clergy, like you, think much of what I was inured to long ago. Come, put out your lamp, and come up to bed; I am sure you can't finish that sermon to-night.'
'If I did,' said Clement, shutting it up, 'it would be to say I was not worth ever to preach again!'
Perhaps Felix, who had entirely disbelieved the report of Edgar's fate till his mind had in a manner become accustomed to the idea, had underrated the amount of shock that it would give Clement, who had never been half so much attached to poor Edgar as himself; nor perhaps might it have done so, but for the unnerved overstrained condition to which the year's solitude and responsibility, the months of nursing, and the days of severe fatigue, had brought him.
Felix was wakened from his first sleep by the strangled scream of nightmare in the next room, and hastening in, broke the spell, and found that poor Clement had been dreaming out what he had told him, and had deemed himself bound, gagged, struggling to come to Edgar's aid, and ask his pardon for having done him some horrible injury, the load of which did not at first pass with awakening.
'No,' he said, when he had entirely resumed his waking powers, 'it is too true! Things never were as they ought to have been between us! Who knows what difference it might have made!'