'As far as I understand you, you mean that there was not sufficient distinction between proven and non-proven--important and unimportant.' 'You begin to perceive. If Faith be overworked, Reason kicks; and, of course, when Owen found the Holt was not the world; that thinking was not the exclusive privilege of demons; that habits he considered as imperative duties were inconvenient, not to say impracticable; that his articles of faith included much of the apocryphal,--why, there was a general downfall!' 'Poor Miss Charlecote,' sighed Robert, 'it is a disheartening effect of so much care.' 'She should have let him alone, then, for Uncle Kit to make a sailor of. Then he would have had something better to do than to _think_!' 'Then you are distressed about him?' said Robert, wistfully. 'Thank you,' said she, laughing; 'but you see I am too wise ever to think or distress myself. He'll think himself straight in time, and begin a reconstruction from his scattered materials, I suppose, and meantime he is a very comfortable brother, as such things go; but it is one of the grudges I can't help owing to Honora, that such a fine fellow as that is not an independent sailor or soldier, able to have some fun, and not looked on as a mere dangler after the Holt.' 'I thought the reverse was clearly understood?' 'She ought to have "acted as sich." How my relatives, and yours too, would laugh if you told them so! Not that I think, like them, that it is Elizabethan dislike to naming a successor, nor to keep him on his good behaviour; she is far above that, but it is plain how it will he. The only other relation she knows in the world is farther off than we are--not a bit more of a Charlecote, and twice her age; and when she has waited twenty or thirty years longer for the auburn-haired lady my father saw in a chapel at Toronto, she will bethink herself that Owen, or Owen's eldest son, had better have it than the Queen. That's the sense of it; but I hate the hanger-on position it keeps him in.' 'It is a misfortune,' said Robert. 'People treat him as a man of expectations, and at his age it would not be easy to disown them, even to himself. He has an eldest son air about him, which makes people impose on him the belief that he is one; and yet, who could have guarded against the notion more carefully than Miss Charlecote?' 'I'm of Uncle Kit's mind,' said Lucilla, 'that children should be left to their natural guardians. What! is Lolly really moving before I have softened down the edge of my ingratitude?' 'So!' said Miss Charteris, as she brought up the rear of the procession of ladies on the stairs. Lucilla faced about on the step above, with a face where interrogation was mingled with merry defiance. 'So that is why the Calthorp could not get a word all the livelong dinner-time!' 'Ah! I used you ill; I promised you an opportunity of studying "Cock Robin," but you see I could not help keeping him myself--I had not seen him for so long.'