“Really and truly, Jenny?”

“Well, not as you would tell mamma, for instance; but as you think in your secret soul.”

“I am sorry you think me so duplex.”

“Come, you understand how anxious I am about the boy.”

“Exactly.”  And they both laughed.

“Is that all?” said Joanna Bowater.

“Really and truly it is!  Rose can manage him much better than I can.”

“He is very fond of her; but does he—­is he—­is his heart in his work?” asked the sister, looking with her honest eyes earnestly at Julius, her contemporary and playfellow as a child, and afterwards the companion with whom she had worked out many a deep problem, rendering mutual assistance that made each enter in no common degree into the inner thoughts of the other.

Julius smiled.  “I doubt whether he has come to his heart yet.”

“Why should he be so young?  Think what you were at twenty-three.”

“I never had Herbert’s physique; and that makes an immense difference.  I had no taste or capacity for what is a great privation to a fine young fellow like him.  Don’t look startled!  He attempts nothing unfitting; he is too good and dutiful, but—­”

“Yes, I know what that but means.”

“Nothing to be unhappy about.  You know how blameless he has always been at Eton and Oxford; and though he may view his work rather in a school-boy aspect, and me as a taskmaster, as long as he is doing right the growth is going on.  Don’t be unhappy, Jenny!  His great clear young voice is delightful to hear; he is capital at choral practices, and is a hero to all the old women and boys, the more so for the qualities that earnestness cannot give, but rather detracts from.”

“You mean that he is not in earnest?”

“Don’t pervert all I say!  He is not past the time of life when all appointed work seems a task, and any sort of excuse a valid cause against it; but he is conscientious, and always good-humoured under a scolding,—­and Rosamond does not spare him,” he added, laughing.

“Then you don’t think there has been a mistake about him?” said Jenny, in a low voice of alarm.

“I have little doubt that when anything develops his inner life, so as to overcome the great strong animal that demands play and exercise, he will be a most useful clergyman.”

“Perhaps he is too young, though I don’t see how it could be helped.  Papa always intended it, because of the living; and Herbert never wished anything else.  I thought he really desired it, but now I don’t know whether he did not only take it as a matter of course.”

“Obedience is no unwholesome motive.  As things stood, to delay his ordination would have been a stigma he did not deserve; and though he might have spent a year with advantage in a theological college, pupilage might only have prolonged his boyhood.  It must be experience, not simply years of study, that deepens him.”