It has been cynically remarked that the young have no faults; they have only the faults of their parents or their teachers. Certain it is that the knowledge of parents is a clue to the understanding of their children. Without that knowledge the teacher enters upon the study of character as upon a property that has never been surveyed. For we are creatures of circumstances; we are what others who live before us have made us; nor is it possible for any man, however chequered his life may be, to emancipate himself from the determining influences of his home life. Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were alike the creatures of their homes. But how different were those homes! It is a strange thought that men and boys may live side by side, and may see each other every day, and yet be as far apart as if they were dwellers in opposite continents. Harry Venniker was the elder son of an English peer, who possessed a stately ancestral seat at Helmsbury, in one of the Midland counties, and a house in Grosvenor Square. His father’s time was divided between Parliamentary attendance, which he regarded sometimes as a relaxation, but more frequently as a bore, and sport, which he considered to be the serious business in life. If Lord Venniker lived a good part of the year in town, he was never at home there. He remembered a few words of an old Horatian stanza, which he had learned by heart as a schoolboy--something about _fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ_; it was his solitary Latin quotation, and he was fond of making use of it to express his satisfaction at escaping from the business and bustle and vaporous fogs of the great city into rural peace and felicity. It is possible that he had not realised all the causes which rendered London distasteful to him. One of them was that he was unconsciously intolerant of a place where there were people who did not know him or salute him. At Helmsbury he was everybody’s friend and everybody’s master. He deserved his popularity and enjoyed it. His family had been settled in that part of England since the Revolution; and the house, which had been built in Queen Anne’s reign, had scarcely been altered, except in some of its sanitary details, during two centuries. When he drove his four-in-hand along the country roads, the silver bells jingling upon the necks of his handsome bays, the villagers would come out of their cottages and bow or curtsy in the doorways, and in answer to his kindly greeting would say, ‘Good morning to you, my lord; God bless your lordship!’ It would in those days have seemed as unnatural, as contrary to the established and recognised system of human affairs, that they should not be respectful to him and his family as that he should not be just and generous to them. His social superiority was taken for granted by them as much as by himself. It was the foundation of society in Helmsbury. Could it be denied or disputed, the world would come to an end; so he thought, and so his neighbours thought