I have heard that the bitterest pang a boy feels on returning to school after his first holidays is reserved for the moment when he opens his desk and recalls the happy hour, full of joyous anticipation, when he had closed that desk with a bang. Oh, the pity of it! The change from that boy to this, from that morning to this evening! How meanly, how inadequately—so it seems to the urchin standing with smudged cheeks before the well-remembered grammar—did the lad who turned the key estimate his real happiness! How little did he enter into it or deserve it! Just such a pang shot through the young rector’s heart as he passed into the rectory porch after that momentous scene at Mrs. Hammond’s. His rage had had time to die down. With reflection had come a full sense of his position. As he entered the house he remembered—remembered only too well, grinding his teeth over the recollection—how secure, how free from embarrassments, how happy had been his situation when he last issued from that door a few, a very few, hours before. Such troubles as had then annoyed him seemed trifles light as air now. Mr. Bonamy’s writ, the dislike of one section in the parish—how could he have let such things as these make him miserable for a moment? How, indeed? Or, if there were anything grave in his situation then, what was it now? He had held his head high; henceforward he would be a by-word in the parish, a man under a cloud. The position in which he had placed himself would still be his, perhaps, but only because he would cling to it to the last. Under no circumstances could it any longer be a source of pride to him. He had posed, will he, nill he, as the earl’s friend; he must submit in the future to be laughed at by the Greggs and avoided by the Homfrays. It seemed to him indeed that his future in Claversham could be only one long series of humiliations. He was a proud man, and as he thought of this he sprang from his chair and strode up and down the room, his cheeks flaming. Had there ever been such a fall before! Mrs. Baker, as yet ignorant of it all, though the news was by this time spreading through the town, brought him his dinner, and he ate something in the dining-room. Then he went back to the study and sat idle and listless before his writing-table. There was a number of “Punch” lying on it, and he took this up and read it through drearily, extracting a faint pleasure from its witticisms, but never for an instant forgetting the cloud of trouble brooding over him. Years afterward he could recall some of the jokes in that “Punch”—with a shudder. Presently he laid it down and began to think. And then, before his thoughts became quite insufferable, they were interrupted by the sound of a voice in the hall.