Nothing but the sweet tone and sad arch smile could have made this speech endurable to Robert, even though he remembered many times when the trembling of the scale in Miss Charlecote's hands had filled him with indignation. 'You allow that it was justice,' he said, smiling. 'No doubt of that,' she laughed. 'Poor Honor! I must have been a grievous visitation, but I am very good now; I shall come and spend Sunday as gravely as a judge, and when you come to Wrapworth, you shall see how I can go to the school when it is not forced down my throat--no merit either, for our mistress is perfectly charming, with _such_ a voice! If I were Phoebe I would look out, for Owen is desperately smitten.' 'Phoebe!' repeated Robert, with a startled look. 'Owen and Phoebe! I considered it _une affaire arrangee_ as much as--' She had almost said you and me: Robert could supply the omission, but he was only blind of _one_ eye, and gravely said, 'It is well there is plenty of time before Owen to tame him down.' 'Oney,' laughed Lucilla; 'yes, he has a good deal to do in that line, with his opinions in such a mess that I really don't know what he does believe.' Though the information was not new to Robert, her levity dismayed him, and he gravely began, 'If you have such fears--' but she cut him off short. 'Did you ever play at bagatelle?' He stared in displeased surprise. 'Did you never see the ball go joggling about before it could settle into its hole, and yet abiding there very steadily at last? Look on quietly, and you will see the poor fellow as sober a parish priest as yourself.' 'You are a very philosophical spectator of the process,' Robert said, still displeased. 'Just consider what a capacious swallow the poor boy had in his tender infancy, and how hard it was crammed with legends, hymns, and allegories, with so many scruples bound down on his poor little conscience, that no wonder, when the time of expansion came, the whole concern should give way with a jerk.' 'I thought Miss Charlecote's education had been most anxiously admirable.' 'Precisely so! Don't you see? Why, how dull you are for a man who has been to Oxford!' 'I should seriously be glad to hear your view, for Owen's course has always been inexplicable to me.' 'To you, poor Robin, who lived gratefully on the crumbs of our advantages! The point was that to you they were crumbs, while we had a surfeit.' 'Owen never seemed overdone. I used rather to hate him for his faultlessness, and his familiarity with what awed my ignorance.' 'The worse for him! He was too apt a scholar, and received all unresisting, unsifting--Anglo-Catholicism, slightly touched with sentiment, enthusiasm for the Crusades, passive obedience--acted faithfully up to it; imagined that to be "not a good Churchman," as he told Charles, expressed the seven deadly sins, and that reasoning was the deadliest of all!'