AT various periods of his tranquil career the Rev. Clement Dulcimer had found it convenient to add to his income by taking a private pupil or two. He could not have endured what he called a herd of young men, meaning half a dozen, but he rather liked to have a couple of intelligent young fellows following him about through the dawdling progress of his out-of-door life, or hanging upon his words in the comfortable quietude of his study. He was an excellent master for classics and theology--mathematics he frankly abhorred--and he taught conscientiously in his own unconventional way. The men he coached generally came out well; but in after life there was a tinge of eccentricity in them--a strain imparted by Clement Dulcimer unawares--and which in one or two cases took the unhappy form of latitudinarianism. Spinoza on the brain, some people called it. The two pupils who had stayed longest at the Vicarage, and occupied the most important position in the minds of the Vicar and his wife, were Kenrick Culverhouse and his first cousin Cyril. Old Sir Kenrick and the Vicar had been at Oxford together, and it seemed the most natural thing that the baronet should send his only son and his orphan nephew to his old chum, more especially as he could nowhere else educate them so well or so cheaply. Culverhouse Castle was a fine historical place in Hampshire, which tourists went out of their way to see, but which the late Sir Kenrick did not regard with any enthusiasm. He had been more or less under a cloud of money difficulties ever since he could remember, and preferred lodgings in St. James’s to his feudal birthplace. The moat was all very well, and so was the massive old keep, on the top of which the gardener had made a kitchen-garden for gooseberries and strawberry beds; but Sir Kenrick liked Jermyn Street and the clubs a great deal better; and, if a man must have a castle, the King’s Bench, in which he had spent some of the liveliest days of his youth, was much pleasanter to his mind than Culverhouse. Lady Culverhouse was fond of the castle, no doubt--or at any rate she stayed there, and it was a tradition in the family that no other air suited her, and that she was quite rooted to the spot; a tradition which was all the more firmly established because nobody had ever proposed taking her anywhere else. Old Sir Kenrick and his wife had gone to join the family ashes in the vault under Culverhouse Church, and young Sir Kenrick reigned in his father’s stead. All the quicksilver in the Culverhouse veins seemed to have run out with the last baronet. Young Kenrick was steady and thoughtful, and the mortgages weighed upon his spirits like a nightmare. He was always thinking what the estate would be if those mortgages could but be paid off. It seemed to him an Eldorado. But there were only he and his cousin and heir presumptive to accomplish this great work. And how were two young men, moderately gifted, to earn fifty thousand pounds between them?