It was early spring, the first rathe-primroses were showing their milk-fair faces on the cliff, and the light-green leaves were beginning to uncrumple on the wind-wilted elders, when John-James appeared on a mission of his own at the Vicarage. There was a good deal of coming and going between the Manor and the Vicarage, for the Parson laid himself open to no charge of alienating affections, but this visit was quick with a portentousness beyond the normal. To begin with, John-James asked for Mr. Boase instead of for Ishmael, and when he was shown into the study he stood revolving his cap in his hands and some weighty thought in his brain till the Parson bade him sit down and say what it was had brought him. But John-James still stood and, his eyes fixed anxiously on the Parson, at last blurted out: "Mr. Boase, you'm tachen Ishmael things like gentry do belong to knaw, aren't 'ee?" "Why, yes," said Boase. "I want to knaw if 'ee'll tache our Vassie too. Archelaus, he'em too old, and thinks on naught but gwain with females, and Tom's doen fine with Mr. Tonkin, and for me--I'm not that class. Farmen's my traade. But the maid, she'm so quick and clever, 'tes only fitty she should have her chance same as the lil'un. She's gwain to be 'ansome, white as a lily she is, and it'll be better for she if she do have things to think of like the gentry. For if Ishmael's gentry, there's no rason Vassie shoulden be. They'm the same blood after all. An' it's dangerous blood, Mr. Boase." The Parson sat for a moment in silence while John-James shifted his feet anxiously. Mingled with the swift appreciation of the humour of himself as tutor to the arrogant Vassie was a pang of reproachful conscience. "What does your mother say?" he temporised; "and Vassie?" "Mother's willen, only she did say you was so took up with the lil'un you wouldn't take no account of Vassie, seeing she'm only a bastard like the rest of us. But Vassie said if you thought it was the right thing to do by her you'd do it." Boase had as little vanity as any man, but it was pleasurably pricked by this. Also he still reproached himself. "John-James," he began almost diffidently, "you mustn't talk like that about bastards--as though it made any difference to me. You know it isn't because of that I look after Ishmael and treat him differently; it's because he was left to me as a charge. I want to make a fine thing of him and for him to make a fine thing of Cloom.... But that includes his overcoming this barrier between him and his family; it won't be complete till he and Archelaus can meet in friendship as brothers should, without a grudge or a fear. All this bad blood needs sweetening." "I daresay," said John-James, "but meanwhile Ishmael'll be growen up further and further from his folk." "But you wouldn't have me not educate him, would you?" urged Boase, speaking as to a fellow-man; "you say yourself it's too late with Archelaus. It always was; he hated me from Ishmael's birth."