“Lord Winterbourne’s son, George Rivers, the heir of the family--he who has been abroad so long; a young man, I hear, whom every one esteemed,” said the Rector, bending down his head, as if he exacted from himself a certain sadness, and did indeed endeavour to see how sad it was--“he is dead.” Mrs Atheling rose, greatly moved. “Oh, Mr Rivers!--did you say his son? his only son? a young man? Oh, I pray God have pity upon him! It will kill him;--it will be more than he can bear!” The Rector looked up at the grief in the good mother’s face, with a look and gesture of surprise. “I never heard any one give Lord Winterbourne credit for so much feeling,” he said, looking at her with some suspicion; “and surely he has not shown much of it to you.” “Oh, feeling! don’t speak of feeling!” cried Mrs Atheling. “It is not that I am thinking of. You know a great many things, Mr Rivers, but you never lost a child.” “No,” he said; and then, after a pause, he added, in a lower tone, “in the whole matter, certainly, I never before thought of Lord Winterbourne.” And there was nobody nigh to point out to him what a world beyond and above his philosophy was this simple woman’s burst of nature. Yet in his own mind he caught a moment’s glimpse of it; for the instant he was abashed, and bent his lofty head with involuntary self-humiliation; but looking up, saw his own thought still clearer in the eye of Agnes, and turned defiant upon her, as if it had been a spoken reproof. “Well!” he said, turning to her, “was I to blame for thinking little of the possibility of grief in such a man?” “I did not say so,” said Agnes, simply; but she looked awed and grave, as the others did. They had no personal interest at all in the matter; they thought in an instant of the vacant places in their own family, and stood silent and sorrowful, looking at the great calamity which made another house desolate. They never thought of Lord Winterbourne, who was their enemy; they only thought of a father who had lost his son. And Rachel, who remembered George Rivers, and thought in the tenderness of the moment that he had been rather kind to her, wept a few tears silently. All these things disconcerted the Rector. He was impatient of excess of sympathy--ebullitions of feeling; he was conscious of a restrained, yet intense spring of new hope and vigour in his own life. He had endeavoured conscientiously to regret his cousin; but it was impossible to banish from his own mind the thought that he was free--that a new world opened to his ambition--that he was the heir!