‘The case in which Aunt Emily (of all people in the world!) should find herself crushed altogether.’ ‘You are a good scholar. You have learned your lesson. In that case you will take care--but only when there is no other hope--to let me know. Now I’ll release you, Mr. Jim. I won’t exact that you should come to my very door. No harm can happen to me between this and my door.’ ‘It is the only part of the way where anything could happen,’ said Jim. ‘It’s the middle of the town.’ ‘A wonderful town, and a wonderful middle,’ she said, laughing. ‘No, nothing will happen. Good night, and I am more obliged to you than I can say.’ Jim stood irresolute, and watched her as she drew down her veil over her face, and hurried along to the door of the schoolhouse. He was, on the whole, well pleased to get rid of her, but he did not like the idea of being thus dismissed at the moment it occurred to her to do so--a sensation which roused his pride and kept him, accordingly, standing where she left him until he saw that she had reached her own door. She turned round there and made a slight gesture of farewell, or dismissal. It was just at that moment that the _convives_ at the ‘Blue Boar’ began to stream out, with a little noise of voices and feet, the last jokes of the little convivial club. Jim turned and hurried homeward, not without an uncomfortable feeling that his return would correspond unpleasingly with the dispersion of that assembly. But yet it was not his fault. His mother was in the drawing-room still, waiting for him, or at least pretending not to wait for him, but to be very busy with something she had to do. And Jim had by this time remembered again the great news he had been carrying home so eagerly when he met Mrs. Brown. Though Jim detested the ‘parish’ in the official sense of the word, he was not without a natural feeling for his own side; and it pleased him almost as much as if he had been a Rector’s son of the more orthodox description to find that the new curate, with his immense commotion as of a new broom, found it necessary after all to have recourse to the old rulers and their ways for help. He had, I need not say, not the faintest idea of the curate’s benevolent intentions towards himself; but Mr. Osborne had been a little superior in the morning--it was his nature to be a little superior--and his final appeal for help to Jim, who of all the Rectory family was the only one whom nobody else would have thought of appealing to, was a triumph which Jim could not but be sensible of. His mother looked up at him from her sewing with those curves about her eyes which he had grown accustomed to, and did not at this present moment take any notice of, notwithstanding the keen inspection of him which she made instantly, an inspection so keen that it seemed to cut below the surface and see what never can be seen. Jim was more or less aware of this inspection when he had anything to conceal, but on this occasion,