What, indeed, but a most relieved acquiescence? He was glad to the heart to find his charge so minded--so glad that he was content to let the other question lapse in the joy of the near prospect of being rid of its burdensome responsibility. And Brion himself? In truth the novel interests which this enterprise had brought him were small compensation for the emotional experiences he had had to suffer in their course. London, for all her promise, had given him but derision and disappointment--a hate, perhaps, dispelled, but a bright illusion darkened; a new serenity won, but an old sorrow made more sorrowful. Yes, he was better back among his moors and streams and lonely hills. One day before they left they rode over to Clapham to pay a visit, which the young man reproached himself with having already delayed to make too long. Yet that visit, too, when accomplished, proved a sorrow and a disappointment. More than eight years had passed since he had ridden, an anxious, unhappy boy, from the gates of the home which for so long time had protected and sheltered him; and now reapproaching it, and recalling its familiar environments, his heart was wonderfully moved with the thought of all that that ancient affection had meant for him. He had heard little of the family during the interval. A letter or two, in the early days of the severance, had passed--one, a little billet, in sedate language and misshapen script, from baby Alse--but with the soon cessation of that small correspondence all association with his former intimates seemed ended. He did not know who was to blame: nobody, perhaps, but only circumstance, in a day of difficult communications. But anyhow such was the case; and he was riding now, with a feeling of strange emotion, to take up what severed ties? Alas! on the very threshold of his expectations a cruel rebuff awaited him. The old school-house was in its place, but with other tenants, and with all its most familiar features improved out of recognition. He learned the facts from those who lived there. The good old untidy Dame, so improvident yet so lovable, so busy yet so unbusinesslike, was dead these many years; the boys, Gregory and Richard, were, the one, in an attorney’s office at Bristol, the other, a clerk at Oxford; the ex-Divine himself, burdened with years, and much reduced in circumstances since his scholars had gradually deserted him with his faculties, lived with his only daughter, now grown a comely young woman, in a humble way in a small domicile near the church.