They were strolling about the garden on this occasion when the young man bewailed himself. Bee, though she made those allusions to Laura, had never got over that little chill in respect to her which had arisen in the most capricious, causeless way when she knew that Laura lived in Oxford. Nothing could be more unreasonable, but yet it was so. It suggested something fictitious in her brother’s eagerness to get back, and in his supposed devotion to his work. Had his Egeria been anywhere else Bee would not have felt this; but she did feel it, though she could not tell why. She was very anxious to please him, to content him, if possible, with his present life, to make her sympathy sweet to him, seeing that he had nobody but herself to console him, and must be separated from Laura until October. Poor Charlie! It was hard indeed that this should be the case, that he should have so dull a home and no companion but his sister. But it could not be helped; his sister, at least, must do what she could. “You must not be angry,” said Bee, very humbly. “It is only an idea that has come into my head--there may be nothing at all in it--but don’t please shut me up as you do sometimes--hear me out. Charlie! there is Mr. Delaine.” “Mister--what?” said Charlie, which indeed did not show a very complaisant frame of mind--but a curate in the country is of less importance in the horizon of the son of a house who is at Oxford than he is in that of the daughter at home. “Mr. Delaine,” repeated Bee. “You don’t remember him, perhaps, at all. He is the curate. When he came first he was said to be a great scholar. He took a first class. You need not say, pooh! Everybody said so, and it is quite true.” “A first in theology, I suppose,” said Charlie, disdainfully. “No, not that--that’s not what people call a first. Mr. Burton, I have always heard, is a good scholar himself, and he said a first; of course you know better than I do what that means.” “Well,” said Charlie, “and supposing for the sake of argument that he took a first--what then?” “Why, Charlie dear! He is an Oxford man too; he must know all the things you want to know--difficult passages and all that. Don’t you think, perhaps----” “Oh, a coach!” cried Charlie. Then he paused, and with withering satire, added “No doubt, for little boys--your curate might do very well, Bee.” “He is not my curate,” said Bee, with indignation; “but I have always heard he was a great scholar. I thought that was what you wanted.” “It is not to be expected,” said her brother, loftily, “that you should know what I want. It is not a coach that is everything. If that were all, there need be no such things as universities. What a man needs is the whole machinery, the ways of thinking, the arrangements, the very atmosphere.” He strolled along the walk with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up to his ears.