He was destined to hear much more of the Archbishop when, his schooldays ended, he was sent, at the age of fifteen, to Oxford with Ned Harley. They were entered at Magdalene Hall, at that time an especially Puritan college, and here his distrust of Dr. Laud and his ways increased not a little. For he rebelled with all his might against the Archbishop’s notion of driving and coercing men into the ways he deemed best for them. Dr. Laud might, as his father always maintained, be a good man, but he was good after a fashion which stirred up all the combative elements in Gabriel’s nature.
Meanwhile Hilary Unett was being educated after a very different fashion. On her return from visiting her Unett kinsfolk she scarcely stirred from home, and her interests were entirely bound up in the quiet cathedral town. It chanced that after two or three rapid changes at the Palace her grandfather, Bishop Coke, had been translated from Bristol to the see of Hereford. He was a good and kind-hearted man, with a great reputation for learning; but now that Mr. Unett was dead, and Gabriel only in Hereford at rare intervals, it naturally followed that every influence round the girl was ecclesiastical. She therefore almost inevitably fell into the way of looking at all questions from the palace point of view.
Now and then, as he watched her, Dr. Harford would recall her father’s words on the day they had heard of Eliot’s death; but as he thought how the paths of the boy and girl were already beginning to diverge, that dream of a future union looked less and less probable.
He sighed as in imagination he looked down the vista of the coming years, plainly foreseeing that stormy times were in store for the nation, and that grave troubles and divisions awaited every household in the land. But he was not a man of many words, and he kept his musings to himself.
CHAPTER III.
This is the time when bit by bit
The days begin to lengthen sweet,
And every minute gained is joy,