Standing at one end of the room, coffee-cups in hand, were Sir William Leader, the Dean of Helstonleigh, Mr. Ashley, and his son. They were talking of the Halliburtons. Sir William knew a good deal of their history from Frank.
"It is most wonderful!" Sir William was remarking. "Self-educated, self-supporting, and to be what they are!"
"Not altogether self-educated," dissented the dean; "for the two younger, the barrister and clergyman, were in the school attached to my cathedral; but self-educated in a great degree. The eldest, my friend's son-in-law, never had a lesson in the classics after his father's death, and there's not a more finished scholar in the county."
"The father died and left them badly provided for," remarked Sir William.
"He did not leave them provided for at all, Sir William," corrected Mr. Ashley. "He left nothing, literally nothing, but the furniture of the small house they rented; and he left some trifling debts. Poor Mrs. Halliburton turned to work with a will, and not only contrived to support them, but brought them up to be what you see them—high-minded, honourable, educated men."
The judge turned his eyes on Jane. She was sitting on a distant sofa, talking with the bishop. So quiet, so lady-like, nay—so attractive—she looked still, in the rich pearl-grey dress warn at William's wedding; not in the least like one who had had to toil hard for bread.
"I have heard of her—heard of her worth from Frank," he said, with emphasis. "She must be one in a thousand."
"One in a million, Sir William," burst forth Henry Ashley. "When they were boys, you could not have bribed them to do a wrong thing: neither temptation nor anything else turned them from the right. And they would not be turned from the right now, if I know anything of them."
The judge walked up to Jane, and took the seat beside her just vacated by the bishop.
"Mrs. Halliburton," said he, "you must be proud of your sons."