“This is a great blow to me,” said Mr. Ingleby solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which his father regarded him made his position at home almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his father now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only returning to Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that his father would be busy in the shop. One circumstance came to bridge the gap between them, a course of pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth year. He was delighted to find a subject in which his father was more learned than himself, and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on pharmacopoeial doses and searching the little nests of drawers for rare drugs to identify in their raw state. But the pharmacology course was short, and the subject that was so important in his father’s life was small and unimportant in Edwin’s. In addition to which he could not help feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with which his father discharged patent medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harmful. Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences of Halesby. His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward Willis had withered under the humiliating _dénouement_ of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the new fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him discontented with Aunt Laura’s ballads; the general air of elegance and refinement with which he had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, made everything in Halesby, even his own home, seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory. North Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more and more. II Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring generalisations that arose from them were exhausted, he found that he could not escape from the fascination of the studies which he now pursued, for the most part, in the company of Matthew Boyce. His third year had not only introduced him to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital life. He had spent long hours in the pathological laboratory and had made acquaintance with bacteriology, a science that was still in its infancy.