“I canna bear to see him” ("can not,” suggested her mistress, who not seeing any reason why Elizabeth should not speak the Queen’s English as well as herself, had instituted h’s, and stopped a few more glaring provincialisms.) “I cannot bear to see him, Miss Hilary, lolling on the arm-chair, when Missis looks so tired and pale, and sitting up o’ nights, burning double fires, and going up stairs at last with his boots on, and waking every body.  I dunnot like it, I say.”

“You forget; Mr. Ascott has his studies.  He must work for the next examination.”

“Why doesn’t he get up of a morning then instead of lying in bed, and keeping the break-fast about till ten?  Why can’t he do his learning by daylight?  Daylight’s cheaper than mould candles, and a deal better for the eyes.”

Hilary was puzzled.  A truth was a truth, and to try and make it out otherwise, even for the dignity of the family, was something from which her honest nature revolted.  Besides, the sharp-sighted servant would be the first to detect the inconsistency of one law of right for the parlor and another for the kitchen.  So she took-refuge in silence and in the apple-pudding she was making.

But she resolved to seize the first opportunity of giving Ascott, by way of novelty, the severest lecture that tongue of aunt could bestow.  And this chance occurred the same afternoon, when the other two aunts had gone out to tea, to a house which Ascott voted “slow,” and declined going to.  She remained to make tea for him, and in the mean time took him for a constitutional up and down the public walks hard by.

Ascott listened at first very good humoredly; once or twice calling her “a dear little prig,” in his patronizing way—­he was rather fond of patronizing his Aunt Hilary.  But when she seriously spoke of his duties, as no longer a boy but a man, who ought now to assume the true, manly right of thinking for and taking care of other people, especially his aunts, Ascott began to flush up angrily.

“Now stop that, Aunt Hilary:  I’ll not have you coming Mr. Lyon over me.”

“What do you mean?”

For of late Ascott had said very little about Mr. Lyon—­not half so much as Mr. Lyon, in his steadily persistent letters to Miss Leaf, told her about her nephew Ascott.

“I mean that I’ll not be preached to like that by a woman.  It’s bad enough to stand it from a man; but then Lyon’s a real sharp fellow, who knows the world, which women don’t, Aunt Hilary.  Besides, he coaches me in my Latin and Greek; so I let him pitch into me now and then.  But I won’t let you; so just stop it; will you.”

Something new in Ascott’s tone—­speaking more of the resentful fierceness of the man than the pettishness of the boy—­frightened his little aunt, and silenced her.  By-and-by she took comfort from the reflection that, as the lad had in his anger betrayed, he had beside him in London a monitor whose preaching would be so much wiser and more effectual than her own that she determined to say no more.