"What a shame!" said Mrs. White indignantly. "And he no older than my Harriet's Willy!"
Mrs. Kemblet rose with majesty, and with majesty she replied, "That's as it may be, but I don't think you realise, Polly, that when the old Duke and his son dies, there'll be only one life between the Count asleep upstairs and the dukedom."
"Lor!" ejaculated Mrs. White.
And by the child upstairs there stood his grandfather and his mother, looking down at him in his rosy abandonment of slumber.
"Papa, he was very fond of him," said Horatia at last, and turning, she threw herself weeping into her father's arms.
CHAPTER IV
(1)
All through the falling of the leaves—the creeper leaves that dropped slowly, resplendent in death, from college walls, the narrow willow leaves that were whirled floating on to the streams, the leaves that made a carpet, the leaves that were like rain, the leaves that laughed as they fell, the leaves that fluttered to the ground like wounded birds—Tristram wrestled with the angel of bewilderment.
Not even Dormer could help him. He had known that from the night at the Rectory. The matter was too intimately between himself and God; he must struggle through alone. And though, when he was back in Oxford, Dormer had come and sought him out in his lodgings, in order to tell him that he thought he was overworking, and ought to spare himself a little more, Tristram merely said that he was quite well, and let him go without a sign.
He was in a mist of anguish and perplexity. If he could only see the path, he told himself, he was ready to follow it, however sharp its flints. But where lay his road? If that reawakened desire of his, hidden from his own eyes till the wind of the Downs had rent the curtain, were sin, then he would cut it from him, at whatever cost. For even then the self that prayed with such intensity for happiness was so much the captive of a surrendered will that at the last it had struggled towards obedience with Non voluntas mea....