“But then you wouldn’t get a scholarship.”
“I haven’t a chance of getting one anyhow. And besides, I don’t know that I particularly want to go to Oxford.”
“But if you’re going to be ordained, Philip?” Aunt Louisa exclaimed in dismay.
“I’ve given up that idea long ago.”
Mrs. Carey looked at him with startled eyes, and then, used to self-restraint, she poured out another cup of tea for his uncle. They did not speak. In a moment Philip saw tears slowly falling down her cheeks. His heart was suddenly wrung because he caused her pain. In her tight black dress, made by the dressmaker down the street, with her wrinkled face and pale tired eyes, her gray hair still done in the frivolous ringlets of her youth, she was a ridiculous but strangely pathetic figure. Philip saw it for the first time.
Afterwards, when the Vicar was shut up in his study with the curate, he put his arms round her waist.
“I say, I’m sorry you’re upset, Aunt Louisa,” he said. “But it’s no good my being ordained if I haven’t a real vocation, is it?”
“I’m so disappointed, Philip,” she moaned. “I’d set my heart on it. I thought you could be your uncle’s curate, and then when our time came—after all, we can’t last for ever, can we?—you might have taken his place.”
Philip shivered. He was seized with panic. His heart beat like a pigeon in a trap beating with its wings. His aunt wept softly, her head upon his shoulder.
“I wish you’d persuade Uncle William to let me leave Tercanbury. I’m so sick of it.”