Perhaps the main error in Mr. Vavasour’s system of education--for he had in his deep and absorbing conscientiousness formed a plan for the bringing-up of his children, from which he never deviated--was, that they were over-educated, and kept too strictly within the narrow bounds of _standard_ and routine. He may have forgotten, and it is probable that his lady wife had never known, that the natural fermentation of human passions within the breast, if too closely confined therein, is liable to become a dangerous element. Tie the vessel in which inflammable matter is kept too tightly and too early down, and when the _hot_ season of the year arrives, and the working goes on with furious heat within, then bursts the ligature and out flies the cork, while careful parents, terrified at the explosion, marvel how, after all their precautions, and the mighty pains they took, there should be a crash so fearful, and so melancholy a waste of good materials. There are some men, and of these was Cecil Vavasour, into whose inner life other, and apparently unauthorised, people entertain a morbid desire to pry. The question of who really ruled at the Castle was often mooted, not only in the village of Switcham itself, but throughout the whole of the adjacent country. That Mr. Vavasour was a very “superior” man, the world had been from the first quite ready to acknowledge. If any confirmation of this received fact were wanting, it was to be found, so said the initiated, in the great and manifest improvement in Lady Millicent’s property since the epoch of her marriage. This improvement had been brought about so quietly, and Mr. Vavasour took so little apparent part in the management of the estates, that it was hard to say at whose instigation, or by whose superior judgment, so many salutary reforms had been carried out. There had been no sudden or startling changes. There had not even been an unjust steward dismissed, or a series of hitherto unsuspected frauds unearthed and punished. How and when this silent, unboastful man worked so effectually for the good, not only of his rich wife’s estates, but for the welfare of each individual amongst the many whom he religiously believed were, in a manner, intrusted to his charge, was a mystery to all. Nor was this the only mystery talked over amongst the inquisitive--and they were many--regarding Cecil Vavasour and his belongings. Was he, asked the curious, a happy and a contented man? Had the acquisition of wealth opened to him new sources of enjoyment? Had Lady Millicent’s husband, during the years of his married life, suffered in mind from domestic disappointment, from the coldness of his wife’s unsympathising nature, or from her besetting sin--a mean jealousy of power? It is very probable that he did so suffer, for those men frequently undergo the most whose exterior is undemonstrative, and who are to all appearance insensible to the touch of Sorrow’s wand; but whether Cecil Vavasour were or were not,