It is needless to say that the years which developed Elinor's child into a youth on the verge of manhood, had not passed by the others of the family without full evidence of its progress. John Tatham was no longer within the elastic boundaries of that conventional youth which is allowed to stretch so far when a man remains unmarried. He might have been characterized as _encore jeune_, according to the fine distinction of our neighbours in France, had he desired it. But he did not desire it. He had never altogether neglected society, having a wholesome liking for the company of his fellow creatures, but neither had he ever plunged into it as those do who must keep their places in the crowd or die. John had pursued the middle path, which is the most difficult. He had cultivated friends, not a mob of acquaintances, although as people say he "knew everybody," as a man who had attained his position and won his success could scarcely fail to do. He had succeeded indeed, not in the fabulous way that some men do, but in a way which most men in his profession looked upon as in the highest degree satisfactory. He had a silk gown like any dowager. He had been leading counsel in many cases which were now of note. He was among, not the two or three perhaps, but the twenty or thirty, who were at the head of his profession. If he had not gone further it was perhaps more from lack of ambition than from want of power. He had been for years in Parliament, but preferred his independence to the chance of office. It is impossible to tell how John's character and wishes might have been modified had he married and had children round him like other men. Had the tall boy in the north, the young hero of Lakeside, been his, what a difference would that have made in his views of life! But Philip was not his, nor Philip's mother--probably, as he always said to himself, from his own fault. This, as the reader is aware, had always been fully recognised by John himself. Perhaps in the old days, in those days when everything was possible, he had not even recognised that there was but one woman in the world whom he could ever wish to marry. Probably it was only her appropriation by another that revealed this fact to him. There are men like this to be found everywhere; not so hotly constituted as to seize for themselves what is most necessary for their personal happiness--possessed by so many other subjects that this seems a thing to be thought of by-and-by--which by-and-by is generally too late.