In her encounter with her daughter Mrs. Sudlow had been beaten "all along the line," but even in her defeat she contrived to extract a grain of comfort from the fact that, as Miss Mawby rarely visited London, but spent nearly all her time at one or another watering-place, either in England or on the Continent, it would not be possible for Fanny and her lover to see much, if anything, of each other. That they would correspond was a foregone conclusion, but Mrs. Sudlow had seen something of the world, and had very limited faith in the axiom that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Within her experience she had not infrequently found that absence has a precisely opposite effect, and that young men--and young maidens too, for that matter--lacking the presence of the object on whom their affections are supposed to be fixed, have a habit of gradually cooling down and of being drawn, as by a magnetic influence which they are unable to resist, to worship at some other shrine, and to conveniently forget, or ignore, the vows they have already whispered in the ear of another. Fanny had told her parents that, as regarded her engagement, no further steps should be taken by her till she was of age; therefore did Mrs. Sudlow derive some barren comfort from the thought that in two years many things might happen. She found it far easier to forgive Philip Winslade than to forgive his mother; indeed, the latter was a piece of magnanimity which transcended the scope of her limited nature. After all, the young man had not been so much to blame. Fanny was an attractive girl, and it was small wonder that he had fallen in love with her. The head and front of his offending lay in the fact that he had been presumptuous enough to aspire to the hand of one in whose veins ran the blood of the ennobled Penmarthens. CHAPTER VII. PERSONAL TO PHIL. Philip Winslade had been educated at the Iselford Grammar School, whence he had gone, with a scholarship, to Cambridge. As he did not conceive himself adapted for either the Church or the Bar, after taking his degree he had cast about for an opening in a tutorial capacity by way of making a start in life. This he had not been long in finding in the family of a certain Mr. Layland, a wealthy London merchant, who engaged him to take charge of the education of his two sons--backward boys who had been spoiled by their mother, lately dead. Under Phil's supervision the lads soon began to make marked progress, and Mr. Layland had every reason to congratulate himself on his choice.