Then one of Mrs. Clough’s friends rose and grew eloquent. He asked if they were to interpret the will of the great and benevolent man, whose portrait looked down upon them, by the spirit or by the letter? If they themselves did not _feel_ that the boy was eligible, as the nurse’s testimony went to prove? That this was a case peculiarly marked out for their charitable construction. And he wound up by inquiring if they thought Humphrey Chetham would expect his representatives to be less humane, less charitable, less conscientious in dealing with a bounty not their own, than that poor struggling, hardworking tanner and his daughter, who had maintained and cherished the orphan in spite of cruelly hard times, and still more cruel slander. And then he told, as an episode, what Sally Cooper had confessed, and how and why Bess had lost her lover. This turned the quivering scale. “Jabez Clegg and his friends” were called in; the verdict which changed the current of his life, was pronounced—Jabez Clegg was a Blue-coat boy! Before the night was out, while the flood-gates of all their hearts were open, Matthew Cooper, though nearly twenty years her senior, asked Bess to be his wife! CHAPTER THE NINTH. THE SNAKE. However ambitious either Jabez or his kind fosterers had been to see him a Blue-coat boy, the parting between them was a terrible wrench. They were to him all the friends or parents he had ever known. Then there were his playmates in the yard, with liberty to run in and out at will; and lastly, there were his dumb pets—his kitten (grown to a cat), his pigeons, and the lame linnet, hopping from perch to finger, and paying him for his love with the sweetest of songs. He was not more stunned by the noise and Easter Monday bustle in the College Yard, or more awed by the imposing presence of Governor Terry and the feoffees, than by the magnitude, order, and antique grandeur of the building henceforth to be his home. Nevertheless, wide open as the gates were for the day, he felt that they would close, and shut him in among the cold strong walls and strangers, never to see his pets or his loving friends again until Whitsuntide should bring another holiday. They older, more experienced, with a better knowledge of all the boy would gain—all the privation and premature labour he would escape—felt only how dull their humble home would be without the willing feet and hands, the smiling face, and the cheerful voice of the sturdy little fellow who for more than seven years had been as their own child. He had given his last charge respecting his furry and feathered brood, exchanged the last clinging embrace under the dark arch, then tore away in quest of a deserted corner, where he might hide the tears he could not wholly restrain.