w! He is no more a
judge than a child of six years old--carries too much sunshine to see
shades.'

'A lieutenant in the navy can hardly be the capital officer that our
Harry is without some knowledge of men and discipline.'

'I grant you, on his own element; but on shore he goes about in his
holiday spectacles, and sees a bird of paradise in every cock-sparrow.'

'Isn't _there_ a glass house that can sometimes make a swan?' said
Ethel, slyly touching her father's spectacles; 'but with you both,
there's always a something to attract the embellishing process; and
between Harry and Aubrey, Dr. Spencer and Sir Matthew, we could hardly
fail to have heard of anything amiss.'

'I don't like it.'

'Then it is hard,' said Ethel, with spirit. 'So steady as he has
always been, he ought to have the benefit of a little trust.'

'He was never like the others; I don't know what to be at with him! I
should not have minded but for that palaver about elder brothers.'

Defend as Ethel might, it was still with a misgiving lest
disappointment should have taken a wrong course. It was hard to trust
where correspondence was the merest business scrap, and neither
Christmas nor the sister's marriage availed to call Tom home; and
though she had few fears as to dissipation, she did dread hardening and
ambition, all the more since she had learnt that Sir Matthew Fleet was
affording to him a patronage unprecedented from that quarter.

No year of Etheldred May's life had been so trying as this last. It
seemed like her first step away from the aspirations of youth, into the
graver fears of womanhood. With all the self-restraint that she had
striven to exercise at Coombe, it had been a time of glorious dreams
over the two young spirits who seemed to be growing up by her side to
be faithful workers, destined to carry out her highest visions; and the
boyish devotion of the one, the fraternal reverence of the other, had
made her very happy. And now? The first disappointment in Leonard had
led--not indeed to less esteem for him, but to that pitying veneration
that could only be yielded by a sharing in spirit of the like
martyrdom; a continued thankfulness and admiration, but a continual
wringing of the heart. And her own child and pupil, Aubrey, had turned
aside from the highest path; and in the unavowed consciousness that he
was failing in the course he had so often traced out with her, and that
all her aid and ready participation in his