‘Ay, sweet; this is love. Let it rest untaxed. It is enough to know such confidence in store for me against a day when to bear my burden longer alone were perchance to see me sink under it. So, you will be happy? It is a brave and fair country, is it not? and, for the house, Nol and our laughter shall mend its glooms. I lived here once, Brion.’ ‘So Clerivault told me, Sir.’ ‘He is a gossip, that. Dost love him too?’ ‘I love him much, Uncle.’ ‘A little mad, though--eh?’ ‘I think a little madness spices life.’ The other laughed. ‘Heart! so it may. Well, he shall be answerable for thine outward parts; act Chiron to thy Diomed; exercise thy limbs in sport and chase and make a skilful swordsman of thee. For thine inner, I must account; rub up my Greek and Latin; look to thine education. Wilt thou be a creditable pupil?’ ‘I will be a willing one.’ ‘That’s sure. I see a life before us of full content--a happy round of simple toils and sober pleasures, asking no more than health and a quiet mind. What is vext Fortune but a gilded sore? A curse on the lust for riches, which, like the fairy gold, turn to ashes in the hands of him that grasps them with a covetous heart. I am gratefuller being poor and lowly. Dost thou hear, child? I am poor at last. Will it turn thee from me?’ For answer--for his heart was full--Brion made but a caressing gesture. But it was enough. ‘God bless thee,’ said his kinsman in a broken voice. ‘Now leave me’--and he put a hand before his eyes. But, as the boy went from the room, too awed for the moment to put the question nearest his heart, the hand was lowered to the half-emptied beaker. CHAPTER XVI. THE TRUTH AT LAST So the parts were cast, and the new life begun in earnest. What was over was prologue; the real business of the house dated from this moment. Its members fell into their places; the weeds were gathered from the Court; the giant in short time, putting his great back into the job, brought order out of Chaos in the garden, and the whole place began to assume an aspect of more homeliness than it had shown for years. Not that on slender means it was to be reclaimed to the prosperity it had once enjoyed; it was ever in Brion’s time a thin estate, a half vacant building; but at least the worst of its desolation was amended to a plausible patchwork, and the cheeriness and devotion of its denizens made up in volume for the emptiness that echoed them in unfurnished rooms.