“I am so glad you think with me, George!” said Helen. “There was always something I was inclined to like about Mr. Wingfold. Indeed I should have liked him quite if he had not been so painfully modest.” “Notwithstanding his sheepishness, though,” returned Bascombe, “there was a sort of quiet self-satisfaction about him, and the way he always said Don’t you think? as if he were Socrates taking advantage of Mr. Green and softly guiding him into a trap, which I confess made me set him down as conceited; but, as I say, I begin to change my mind. By Jove! he must have worked pretty hard too in the dust-bins to get together all those bits of gay rag and resplendent crockery!” “You heard him say he had help,” said Helen. “No, I don’t remember that.” “It came just after that pretty simile about gleaning in old fields.” “I remember the simile, for I thought it a very absurd one--as if fields would lie gleanable for generations!” “To be sure--now you point it out!” acquiesced Helen. “The grain would have sprouted and borne harvests a hundred. If a man will use figures, he should be careful to give them legs. I wonder whom he got to help him--not the rector, I suppose?” “The rector!” echoed Mrs. Ramshorn, who had been listening to the young people’s remarks with a smile of quiet scorn on her lip, thinking what an advantage was experience, even if it could not make up for the loss of youth and beauty--“The last man in the world to lend himself to such a miserable makeshift and pretence! Without brains enough even to fancy himself able to write a sermon of his own, he flies to the dead,--to their very coffins as it were--and I will not say STEALS from them, for he does it openly, not having even shame enough to conceal his shame!” “I like a man to hold his face to what he does, or thinks either,” said Bascombe. “Ah, George!” returned his aunt, in tones of wisdom, “by the time you have had my experience, you will have learned a little prudence.” Meantime, so far as his aunt was concerned, George did use prudence, for in her presence he did not hold his face to what he thought. He said to himself it would do her no good. She was so prejudiced! and it might interfere with his visits.--She, for her part, never had the slightest doubt of his orthodoxy: was he not the son of a clergyman and canon?--a grandson of the church herself? CHAPTER XXI. A THUNDERBOLT.