Jack rapped out the name. “Clode! Clode, and no one else, I will be bound!” he said. “And you do not love him.”
The rector had not expected the reply. He started, and, removing his foot from the fender, turned sharply so as to face his friend. “No,” he said slowly, “I do not think I do like him. I consider that he has behaved badly, Jack. He has not stood by me as he should have done, or as I would have stood by him had our positions been reversed. I do not think he has called here once since the bazaar, except on business, and then I was out. I had planned, indeed, to see him to-day and ask him what it meant, and, if I found he had come to an adverse opinion in my matter, to give him notice. But now——”
“You will make him a present of the living instead,” Jack said grimly.
“I do not know why he should get it,” the rector answered, with a frown, “more than any one else.”
“It is the common report that he will,” Jack retorted. “As for that, however——”
But why follow him through all the resources of his art? He put forth every effort—perhaps against his own better judgment, for a man will do for his friend what he will not do for himself—to persuade the rector to recall his decision. And he failed. He succeeded, indeed, in wringing the young clergyman’s heart and making him wince at the thought of his barren future and his curate’s triumph; but there his success ended. He made no progress toward inducing him to change his mind; and presently he found that all the arguments he advanced were met by a set formula, to which the rector seemed to cling as in self-defence.
“It is no good, Jack,” he answered—and if he said it once, he said it half a dozen times—“it is no good! I cannot take any one’s advice on this subject. The responsibility is mine, and I cannot shift it! I must try to do right according to my own conscience!”
Jack did not know that the words were Kate’s, and that every time the rector repeated them he had Kate in his mind. But he saw that they were unanswerable; and when he had listened to them for the sixth time he took up his hat in a huff. “Well, have our own way!” he said. “After all, you are right. It is your business and not mine. Give Clode the living if you like!”
And he went out sharply.