And, as regards the inward man, they differed far more widely. Every year their modes of thought, fancies, tastes, and habits, were diverging more decidedly. Clayton sought command and power, and to be admired; Cradockʼs chief ambition was to be loved by every one. And so with intellectual matters; Clayton showed more dash and brilliance, Cradock more true sympathy, and thence more grasp and insight. Clayton loved the thoughts which strike us, Cradock those which move us subtly. But, as they lived not long together, it is waste of time to _finesse_ between them. Whatever they were, they loved one another, and could not bear to be parted. Meanwhile, their “Uncle John” as they always called Mr. Rosedew—their uncle only in the spirit—was nursing and making much of a little daughter of his own. Long before Lady Nowellʼs death, indeed for ten long years before he obtained the living of Nowelhurst, with the little adjunct of Rushford, he had been engaged to a lady–love much younger than himself, whose name was Amy Venn. Not positively engaged, I mean, for he was too shy to pop the question to any one but himself, for more than seven years of the ten. But all that time Amy Venn was loving him, and he was loving her, and each would have felt it a grievous blow, if the other had started sideways. Miss Venn was poor, and had none except her widowed mother to look to, and hence the parson was trebly shy of pressing a poor manʼs suit. He, a very truthful mortal, had pure faith in his Amy, and she had the like in him. So for several years he shunned the common–room, and laid by all he could from his fellowship, college–appointments, and professorship. But when his old friend Sir Cradock Nowell presented him to the benefice—not a very gorgeous one, but enough for a quiet parsonʼs family—he took a clean white tie at once, vainly strove to knot it grandly, actually got his scout to brush him, and after three glasses of common–room port, strode away to his Amy at Kidlington. There he found her training the apricot on the south wall of her motherʼs cottage, one of the three great apricot–trees that paid the rent so nicely. What a pity they were not peaches; they would have yielded so fit a simile. But peachbloom will not thrive at Kidlington, except upon ladies’ faces.