told me more than once that she believed she had the makings of a fine woman. If she had been here now, she would have advised us; for I can't help feeling that we are at a parting of the ways. If we had had her help these last few years it might have been different. I have thought that you made a mistake in not trying again when you came back from abroad. Persistence sometimes works wonders."

"I cannot bear the idea of pestering a girl until she accepts an offer out of sheer weariness," said Tristram with some heat.

"No, I know, and I respect you, my dear fellow," said the Rector, looking at him affectionately. Continuing to look at him, he went on: "Of course, too, I have doubted whether I have been right to allow you to see so much of her. But sometimes I thought you were getting over it, and Horatia is so entirely at her ease with you that I feared to interrupt a friendship which I always hoped might become something else. But I believe it has been a strain on you, Tristram. I can see it all now, and it must not go on. It is not fair to you. How long is it since she refused you?"

"Five years. I asked her in 1825, the summer before my mother died."

"Well, well," said the Rector, sighing gently, "the sooner you try your luck again the better. The child strikes me as unsettled, and a little depressed perhaps. Anyhow, for your own sake, I do not think you ought to wait. I could wish that this young friend of yours were not coming, for it means that nothing can be done for a week or two. However, there is the autumn before you, and if Horatia won't have you, you will soon be taking Orders and wanting to settle down, and perhaps you will see someone else. You are not the sort of man to have to wait long for a living, and you will be lonely without a wife. If my girl is so foolish as to refuse you again, well——"

Tristram shook his head. "There is no 'well,' Mr. Grenville. It is Horatia or nobody for me."

CHAPTER III

(1)

One of Tristram Hungerford's earliest recollections was of the smell of sealskin, of its delicious softness, and of its singular utility, when rubbed the wrong way, as a medium for tracing the journeys of the children of Israel during Mr. Venn's long sermons in Clapham parish church. His Mamma, as he sat snuggled up against her, never reproved him for this ingenious use of her attire, and the stern, sad, greyhaired man, on the other side of her, could not see his small son's occupation, and would not have realised its significance if he had. For if at any given moment John Hungerford was not attending to Mr. Venn, he was thinking of the cause to which he had given his whole life and the greater part of his substance—the abolition of the slave-trade—thinking too, perhaps, of his English childhood, of his youth and young manhood spent in Barbados as manager to that very rich planter, his uncle, of his return to England a convinced champion of the freedom of the negro, his untiring labours to that end, in Parliament and out of it, his friendship with the like-minded group that held Wilberforce and Stephen, the Thorntons, Lord Teignmouth and Hannah More, and finally the meeting with Selina Heathcote, who now sat by his side, and the healing of that fierce loneliness which had cut the lines in his face that made people somewhat afraid of him.

Tristram, however, was not one of these persons, though he had early realised that Papa was not quite the same on Sundays as on other days, connecting the fact with his known study of prophecy and with the puzzling distinction that was drawn between walking across the Common to church (which was permissible) and walking on the same portion of the earth's surface after church (which was not).

But, after all, Sunday (with its sealskin alleviations in winter) was soon over, and thereafter Tristram was free, with his special friends Robert Wilberforce, little John Venn, and Tom Macaulay, to play by the Mount Pond and to explore the mysteries of the Common, or, if it was wet, reinforced by other Wilberforces and Venns, to engage in endless games of hide and seek up and down the big house, with its spreading lawns and aged elms, to which, three years before the old century had run out, John Hungerford had brought his bride. Mrs. Hungerford's chief characteristic was a charity that knew no bounds, so that it was in her drawing-room that Mr. Venn propounded his novel scheme of district visiting, and in her spare bedrooms that the unfortunate African lads, who were being educated as an experiment at Mr. Graves's school on the Common, were nursed back to life after having nearly died of pneumonia. And on a day in May, 1800, Tristram had made his own appearance under its roof, and now he himself, clad in a blue coat with white collar and ruffles, attended that academy with his small friends.

Yet those earliest pictures of Evangelical Clapham, of his father pacing up and down the lawn under the elms in earnest talk with Mr. Wilberforce, of his mother smiling at her guests assembled round the great mahogany dining table (to meet, perhaps, Mrs. Hannah More or Mr. Gisborne of Yoxall, the famous preacher), were soon overlaid with others. In 1808 John Hungerford's health, shaken by his exertions for the General Abolition Act of the previous year, began to cause anxiety. The doctors recommended change of scene, and air more bracing than that of Clapham village, suggesting a temporary retirement to the neighbourhood of the Sussex or the Berkshire Downs. Mrs. Hungerford having a distant relative in the latter county—the young wife of the Rector of Compton Regis—and a suitable house at Compton Parva, the next village, falling vacant, this house was bought, the Hungerfords intending to divide their time between Clapham and Berkshire. But John Hungerford, worn out with his labours in the cause to which he had sacrificed everything, died a few months later, and Mrs. Hungerford, with her son, was left in circumstances considerably reduced. The large West Indian income reverted, on her husband's death, to other hands, and so the mansion at Clapham had to be sold, and the newly-acquired house at Compton became their permanent home. But at Compton, too, death had been busy, for the Rector was now a widower, almost inseparable from his baby girl. At Mrs. Hungerford's request he undertook to prepare Tristram for Eton. Herein he was carrying out her own wishes against those of her friends of the Common, who were inclined to regard public schools as nurseries of vice and Cambridge as the only tolerable University. Already Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Venn had urged tutors at home in preference to this scheme, and Mr. Zachary Macaulay had suggested that Tristram should accompany Tom to his private school in preparation for Cambridge. But all the Heathcotes from time immemorial had gone to Eton and Oxford, and Mrs. Hungerford, praying always against the spirit of worldliness, intended Tristram to follow the tradition.

And so for three years Tristram rode his pony to the Rectory, and learnt to write Latin verse, while Mrs. Hungerford did her best to counteract the Rector's educational plans for his little daughter. Disappointed in his hopes of a son, Mr. Grenville said that there was no reason why Horatia should not be as good a scholar as any boy, and to this end she was to begin Latin at five and Greek at six, and meanwhile he gave her everything she wanted. But before Horatia had mastered Mensa, a table, the white pony had ceased its visits to the