"You forget," said Mrs. Halifax, tenderly—"you forget, John, how much you have been doing, and intend to do. What with your improvements at Enderley, and your Catholic Emancipation—your Abolition of Slavery and your Parliamentary Reform—why, there is hardly any scheme for good, public or private, to which you do not lend a helping hand."
"A helping purse, perhaps, which is an easier thing, much."
"I will not have you blaming yourself. Ask Phineas, there—our household Solomon."
"Thank you, Ursula," said I, submitting to the not rare fortune of being loved and laughed at.
"Uncle Phineas, what better could John have done in all these years, than look after his mills and educate his three sons?"
"Have them educated, rather," corrected he, sensitive over his own painfully-gained and limited acquirements. Yet this feeling had made him doubly careful to give his boys every possible advantage of study, short of sending them from home, to which he had an invincible objection. And three finer lads, or better educated, there could not be found in the whole country.
"I think, John, Guy has quite got over his fancy of going to Cambridge with Ralph Oldtower."
"Yes; college life would not have done for Guy," said the father thoughtfully.
"Hush! we must not talk about them, for here come the children."
It was now a mere figure of speech to call them so, though in their home-taught, loving simplicity, they would neither have been ashamed nor annoyed at the epithet—these two tall lads, who in the dusk looked as man-like as their father.