She followed her husband, leaving Dick to his breakfast and his wondering thoughts. He faintly remembered his cousin John Trevanion, who ten years before had lived in the now empty Dower House, between the Towers and the village, as his father had done before him. John Trevanion had then been a gay, careless, happy-go-lucky young man of thirty, who lived on the Squire’s bounty, riding his horse among the county yeomanry, hunting with his neighbours, roistering it with the most rakish young blades of the adjacent manors, joining in daredevil escapades with the smugglers. His antics and riotings became a byword in the country-side, and Dick remembered how, when a young boy, he had witnessed several violent scenes between his father and John after some particularly outrageous exploit. Old Pollex had told him that the Squire had threatened many times that unless John reformed he would no longer be allowed to occupy the Dower House, and had forgiven him over and over again. At last a day came when John disappeared. Dick had never learnt the true reason; the Squire never mentioned his cousin; Pollex, when questioned, shook his head and pursed up his lips, and said that John Trevanion was a villain; and Dick had formed the conclusion from stray hints that the ne’er-do-well cousin had been driven out of the country by some criminal act. For ten years he had not been heard of, and he had wholly slipped from Dick’s thoughts. Having finished his breakfast, Dick took his cap and set off for his two-mile walk to the Parsonage, where he went daily to receive lessons in classics and literature from Mr. Carlyon, the vicar. He had never been to school, his father’s resources being incapable of bearing the expense. A few years before this time the Squire had been seriously disturbed about his son’s education. He was himself a sufficiently competent tutor in mathematics, but what classics he ever had had wholly left him, and he was miserable in the thought that the boy was growing up without the elements of the education of a gentleman. At this point the vicar stepped in with a proposal. He was a liberal-minded, genial man, a fellow of his college, a student of his county’s antiquities, and in his ’varsity days had been a notable athlete. Now, though well on in years, he would often, on a Sunday afternoon after church, lend his countenance to wrestling bouts and games of baseball among the village youths. He rode to hounds, and judged at coursing matches, these and similar avocations probably accounting for the fact that a history of the parish, which he had commenced twenty years before, was still unfinished. One day he suggested to the Squire that he should give Dick lessons in Latin and Greek, to keep himself from rusting, as the worthy man delicately put it, but really to make good the deficiency due to his friend’s straitened means. Mr. Trevanion gladly accepted the offer, and