Father and son had both meant what they said; and even the mother, for whom it would be the cruellest wrench of all, knew that Henry was going to leave home. Not literally on the morrow, for the following evening he had appeared before his father to apologise for the manner--carefully for the manner, not _the matter_,--in which he had spoken to him the evening before, and asked for a day or two in which to make his arrangements for departure. James Mesurier was too strong a man to be resentful, and he accepted his son's apology with a gentleness that, as each knew, detracted nothing from the resolution which each had come to. "My boy," he said, "you will never have such good friends as your father and mother; but it is best that you go out into the world to learn it." There is something terribly winning and unnerving to the blackest resolution, when the severity of the strong dissolves for a brief moment into tenderness. The rare kind words of the stern, explain it as we will, and unjust as the preference must surely be, one values beyond the frequent forgivenesses of the gentle. Mary Mesurier would have laid down her life in defence of her son's greatest fault, and James Mesurier would as readily have court-martialled him for his smallest, and yet, somehow, a kind word from him brought the tears to his son's eyes. He had no longer the heart to stimulate the rebellion of Esther, as he felt it his duty to do; and, to her disappointment, he announced that, on the whole, it would perhaps be best for him to go alone. "It would almost kill poor mother," he said; "and father means well after all," he added. "I'm afraid it would break father's heart," said Esther. So these two young people agreed to spare their parents, though--let it not be otherwise imagined--at a great sacrifice. The little paper on which they had carefully worked out their housekeeping, skilfully allotting so much for rent, butcher's meat, milk, coals, and washing, and making "everything" come most optimistically to _£59 17s. 9d._ a year, would be of no use now, at all events for the present. Their little Charles and Mary Lamb dream must be laid aside--for, of course, they had thought of Charles and Mary Lamb; and indeed, out beyond this history of a few youthful years, their friendship was to prove itself far from unworthy of its famous model.