'As well as any place! Oh, Clem! as long as you don't want to leave us behind I am glad.'

'I was so much afraid of your sending me away alone that I begin to fear you are making home too dear.'

'Nay,' with a sobbing laugh, 'if your Vicar told you to bring me, you need not mind. I do believe those dingy streets are more to you than all that cloister and river.'

'I can't help it, Cherry. I came here solely because my brother wanted me, and am heartily thankful for it; but, as you say, I have not rooted. We could not have his love from old association, and comparatively only cared for it through him. No doubt there is much that I love and prize, and any cure of souls must be most important; but now that East Ewmouth is to be separated and Blackstone Gulley is in a manner tamed, I can't get rid of the sense that it is too highly paid and too easy a life for a strong man of thirty, good for nothing but sheer work. Nor would he think it desertion. He told me on that last day, when the Rectory was transferred, that the purpose was fulfilled, and I need not be hindered.'

'Too little work! Yet you are often on the point of being overdone.'

'I have been, but that was from East Ewmouth and other things that are over now. A curate there must be, because one can't be in two places at once, but except at special times of pressure, the work is hardly enough for two. It is just the thing for a man who has a brain and a pen like Will's. I never saw anything more telling than his pamphlet on godless education.'

'So we leave it to them.'

'Not so fast. I must be sure this consent is not the restlessness of grief, Cherry. Besides, we must ascertain that John approves on Gerald's account, and in the meantime, we had better say nothing to Robina.'

The proposal was too advantageous to his family for John not to look at it on all sides, indeed he would scarcely hear of it till he had met Clement and Mr. Fulmort in Whittingtonia, and looked over the house; but the inspection made him listen more favourably, and so did an interview with Gerald's doctor, and a correspondence with Cherry. Taking into account the child's incapacity for out-door sports, and Cherry's artistic and literary tastes, he saw advantages in the scheme. The Priory was too large for the reduced numbers, and all its interests and enjoyments had hinged on its loving master; but Cherry's London associations were disconnected from him, and the inducements to cultivate her art would save it from being dropped for want of the stimulus he had given; nor was the benefit of the family home for Bernard to be by any means forgotten. To be sure, Wilmet believed that Cherry could never be well or happy there, but then her rooms should be kept intact for her return when Clement might betake himself to his congeners in the clergy-house, and Wilmet was secular woman enough to think £800 a year wasted on him and his subscriptions, when it might be making Will and Robina happy.

So one spring afternoon, as Robina was trudging homewards, basket in hand, from a distant hamlet, pausing on the topmost point of the bridge to look at the swelling of the river, and the swirling eddies that rushed out of sight, she heard herself hailed, and on the Ewmouth road beheld a broad clerical undress hat, surmounting a black figure, with a bag over his shoulder. To run down the bridge and meet in the middle of a miry pool was the work of a very few seconds.