‘Oh, never mind what you thought--it came all right,’ cried Elly, with a little impatience. But, as a matter of fact, John could not forget, though she puzzled him for a moment by that sudden imputation of causeless forebodings that it was Elly who had been afraid. CHAPTER XII. SUSIE. Susie arrived a few days later, having left John time, as she believed, to resume his relations with his old friends, and get himself received upon such foundations as were practicable in the change of circumstances. It was a subject which she and her mother had talked over often with different opinions. For it was apparent to both that the question was very doubtful as to how John going back, no longer a boy, but a man, no longer an equal in the school-work which had united him to these friends of youth, but divorced from all their ways and traditions in the path of practical life, would be received by them. Mrs. Sandford had been of opinion that the bland and patronising woman who had attempted to fathom her own circumstances in a ten-minutes’ interview, would summarily drop the young man, who was the son of a matron in a hospital, and had no standing of any kind which could place him on a level with her family. So would the young clergyman. ‘Clergymen are never indifferent to social inequalities,’ she said. And it was her severe opinion that the only way to demonstrate to John the fact of his practical severance from all those boyish ties was to let him return to Edgeley and see for himself that kindness shown to a boy was a very different thing from friendship accorded to a man. ‘Mother, you are sending him there to be wounded and trampled on,’ Susie had said: to which Mrs. Sandford had replied with a smile, ‘Not if you are right, Susie.’ But, nevertheless, this was most likely what the stern woman meant, to prove to him of how little worth was the friendship upon which he had built, that sort of amateur motherhood and sisterhood of the ladies at Edgeley, who had beguiled his heart in his youth into a faith in them which his real mother did not believe they would ever justify. She was not aware, perhaps, of any taint of jealousy in her own mind, any remnant of the inevitable wound which she had shown so little, but which she had still felt, in the days when he had hotly resisted her influence, and told her she was Emily. Mrs. Sandford had been very magnanimous. She had not punished John in any way, not even by a taunt, for that cruel utterance of his youthful despair; but perhaps there had lingered in her heart a tone of vindictiveness towards the lady who had been so kind to him--so strangely kind, the mother thought, but whose regard was no doubt so artificial, so little likely to survive the pressure of years. She was willing that he should find this out, that he should be undeceived. The blow might be a keen one, but it was necessary, she said to herself.