They laughed together at the recollection.
The Canon had not been hard upon the classically-minded delinquents.
Quentillian believed himself to have realized fully the adjuncts, necessary and fitting in the eyes of the Morchard family, but to himself distasteful in the extreme, of his engagement to Valeria.
He was prepared for conventional congratulations, for the abhorrent necessity of discussing his personal affairs, for an emotional absence of reticence that would differ as widely from his own impersonal, dissecting-room outspokenness as would the Canon’s effusive periods from Quentillian’s cultivated terseness of expression.
Nevertheless, he was less well-armoured, or more severely tried, than he had expected to be.
Canon Morchard seemed to shower welcome, blessings, congratulations upon him. He said:
“Dear lad, you and I must have a long talk together, at no distant date.”
They had many.
It seemed to Quentillian that he saw more of the Canon than of Valeria, in the days that ensued.
“Val, when will you marry me? I’m quite selfish enough to want you to myself,” Quentillian said to her with firmness after a week at St. Gwenllian that seemed to him to have been mainly differentiated from his last visit there by the increased number of one-sided talks with the Canon to which he had been subjected.