'Home' was some bachelor lodgings in a very rustic cottage with a porch all overgrown with Tangier peas, and a queerly-shaped dining-room, the ceiling of which was so low that Mr. Yorke's head seemed but a little way off it as he walked about. On the other side of the passage was a drawing-room, wonderfully smart and uncomfortable, with groups of wax fruit under glass shades on rickety tables, crochet couvrettes over the back of almost every chair as well as on the sofa, and a wonderful festoon of green and yellow tissue paper round the glass above the mantelpiece. Mr. Yorke took Cecil in there while the cloth was being laid, but told him he never sat there, as there was not a single chair which would bear his weight, nor a table which did not creak when it was leant upon.
'I should turn all this trumpery out, and make Mrs. Keeling give me something sensible,' said Cecil, with a boy's rough-and-ready way of disposing of difficulties.
'No, you wouldn't, if you saw what a delight she takes in it all, and what a solace it is to her to come and dust and admire. Between the dining-room and a little den I have up-stairs, I do very well. I only hope you'll have as snug a little hole and as worthy a little landlady when you are a curate in lodgings.'
'I don't know whether I shall ever be a clergyman now,' said Cecil gloomily.
Mr. Yorke, who was standing at the window looking out, while his guest had ventured on one of the dangerous chairs, turned round in surprise. 'You don't mean to say you are giving up that? I thought you had wished it ever since you were four years old.'
'So I have; and if I had stayed at Eastwood, I might some day have got one of the Hulston scholarships, and that would have helped me at college; but now there's no chance for me. I'm going to old Bardsley's day school in Fairview, and there's nothing to be got there.'
'Still I wouldn't give up if I were you, my boy; I would keep the hope before me. There's nothing like a high aim to help one through the drudgery of school-work, and keep one out of stupid, little, mean temptations.'
'I know, and it was for that I worked,' said Cecil, 'at least for that chiefly; but it was all no use, and it doesn't seem worth while to try any more.'
Mr. Yorke, who had supposed that Cecil hadn't worked, did not quite know what answer to make to this.
'I think it seems more worth while than ever,' he said after a minute. 'If one has lost ground, one must make it up again somehow. You know you might be ordained even without going to Oxford, though I don't mean to say that a college education is not a good thing, if one can have it.'