"Then you don't think it ignominious," he said, with his face lighting up considerably, "to fish in summer and shoot in autumn and hunt in winter, and make that the only business of one's life?"
"I should if it were the only business, but it needn't be, and you don't make it so. My father speaks very highly of the way you look after your property; and he knows what attending to an estate is. And then you have so many opportunities of being kind and useful to the people about you that you might do more good that way than by working night and day at a profession. Then you owe much to yourself, because if every one began with himself, and educated himself, and became satisfied and happy with doing his best, there would be no bad conduct and wretchedness to call for interference. I don't see why you should be ashamed of shooting and hunting and all that, and doing them as well as anybody else, or far better, as I hear people say. I don't think a man is bound to have ambition and try to become famous: you might be of much greater use in the world, even in such a little place as Eglosilyan, than if you were in Parliament. I did say to Mrs. Trelyon that I should like to see you in Parliament, because one has a natural pride in any person one admires and likes very much, and one wishes—"
He saw the quick look of fear that sprang to her eyes—not a sudden appearance of shy embarrassment, but of absolute fear—and he was almost as startled by her blunder as she herself was. He hastily came to her rescue. He thanked her in a few rapid and formal words for her patience and advice; and, as he saw she was trying to turn away and hide the mortification visible on her face, he shook hands with her and let her go.
Then he turned. He had been startled, it is true, and grieved to see the pain her chance words had caused her. But now a great glow of delight rose up within him, and he could have called aloud to the blue skies and the silent woods because of the joy that filled his heart. They were but chance words, of course. They were uttered with no deliberate intention: on the contrary, her quick look of pain showed how bitterly she regretted the blunder. Moreover, he congratulated himself on his rapid piece of acting, and assured himself that she would believe that he had not noticed that admission of hers. They were idle words: she would forget them. The incident, so far as she was concerned, was gone.
But not so far as he was concerned. For now he knew that the person whom, above all other persons in the world, he was most desirous to please, whose respect and esteem he was most anxious to obtain, had not only condoned much of his idleness out of the abundant charity of her heart, but had further, and by chance, revealed to him that she gave him some little share of that affection which she seemed to shed generously and indiscriminately on so many folks and things around her. He, too, was now in the charmed circle. He walked with a new pride through the warm, green meadows, his rod over his shoulder: he whistled as he went, or he sang snatches of "The Rose of Allandale." He met two small boys out bird's-nesting: he gave them a shilling apiece, and then inconsistently informed them that if he caught them then or at any other time with a bird's nest in their hands he would cuff their ears. Then he walked hastily home, put by his fishing-rod, and shut himself up in his study with half a dozen of those learned volumes which he had brought back unsoiled from school.
CHAPTER XXII.
ON WINGS OF HOPE.
When Trelyon arrived late one evening at Penzance he was surprised to find his uncle's coachman awaiting him at the station: "What's the matter, Tobias? Is the old gentleman going to die? You don't mean to say you are here for me?"
"Yaäs, zor, I be," said the little old man with no great courtesy.