The words took William by surprise. "Oh, Mr. Ashley, do you really mean it?"
"Really mean it? It is little enough, compared with what you are doing. A few years, William, and your name may be great in Helstonleigh. You are working on for it."
William walked with Mr. Ashley as far as his house, and then turned back to his own. He found sorrow there. Not having been home since dinner-time, for he had taken tea at Mr. Ashley's, he was unconscious of some tidings which had been brought by the afternoon's post. Jane sat and grieved while she told him. Her brother Robert was dead. Very rarely indeed did she hear from the New World; Margaret appeared to be too full of cares and domestic bustle to write often. She might not have written now, but to tell of the death of Robert.
"I have lost myself sometimes in a vision of seeing Robert home again," said Jane, with a sigh. "And now he is gone!"
"He was not married, was he?" asked William.
"No. I fear he never got on very well. Never to be at his ease."
Gar came in noisily, and interrupted them. The death of an uncle whom he had never seen, and who had lived thousands of miles away, did not appear to Gar to be a matter calling for any especial amount of grief. Gar was in high spirits on his own account; for Gar was going to Cambridge. Not in all the pomp and pride of an unlimited purse, however, but as a humble sizar.
Gar, not seeing his way very clearly, had been wise enough to pluck up courage and apply for counsel to the head master of the college school. He had told him that he meant to go to college, and how he meant to go, and he asked Mr. Keating if he could help him to a situation, where he might be useful between terms. "A school where I might become a junior assistant," suggested Gar. "Or any family who would take me to read with their sons? If I only earned my food, it would be so much the less weight upon my mother," added he, in the candid spirit peculiar to the family.
"Have you forgotten that you ought to work, yourself, out of terms, nearly as hard as in them?" asked Mr. Keating.
"Oh, no, sir, I have not forgotten it. I will take care to accomplish my own work as well. That should not suffer."