“Indeed, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Fellowes with much heartiness, and with an unholy tendency to laughter, “I agree with you, and no doubt, as is the way of such things, your hopes are bound up in the hopes and happiness of another. For her sake alone you must consider your position seriously.” “Yes, I will turn my thoughts to some other sphere of action, but before I leave here,” he added with solemn resolve, “I deem it my duty to my employers to represent to them the urgent advisability of sending my elder pupil to a public school—I know you agree with me in this, Mrs. Fellowes?” “Agree with you! why, we have been fighting for it for years.” “Then I may rely on your and your husband’s help in this matter?” he asked, looking rather askew admiration at her through his eyeglasses. He had received a slight injury to one eye in his youth, and according to Dacre it was now “a game one”. By these suggestions of Mr. Gedge it will be seen that Gwen’s leaven was working. CHAPTER IX. THE decree had gone forth, and Dacre was to go to Eton. Ancestral taint and sisterly guile had won the day, though not without a tough struggle. The idea of home culture, vague and ill-defined as it was, died hard, and Mr. and Mrs. Waring still bemoaned their fate daily in the intervals of work. They were now much disturbed in their minds concerning the plan of religion which they had conceived in the tender youth of their offspring, and which had been worked up to with rather more consistency than usually characterized those plans of theirs that dealt with outside and minor matters. That it should have occurred to Henry and Grace Waring was the most remarkable part of this plan. They both looked upon religion as they did upon art, as a thing apart and on a somewhat low level, to be considered in leisure hours. In some phases of mind they might indeed almost have been said to glory in it, and to rejoice that the ages should own such a heritage, just as one might rejoice in the work of a great master. They were, of course, both too appreciative of good literature to have neglected the Bible, they knew every twist and turn in it as they did of the Koran and the Brahminic Vedas.