a university degree for the
sons.

'It drives me mad when I think of it,' said Joshua, the elder. 'And here
we work and work in our own bungling way, and the utmost we can hope for
is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible admission to a
Theological college, and ordination as despised licentiates.'

The anger of the elder was reflected as simple sadness in the face of the
other. 'We can preach the Gospel as well without a hood on our surplices
as with one,' he said with feeble consolation.

'Preach the Gospel--true,' said Joshua with a slight pursing of mouth.
'But we can't rise!'

'Let us make the best of it, and grind on.'

The other was silent, and they drearily bent over their books again.

The cause of all this gloom, the millwright Halborough, now snoring in
the shed, had been a thriving master-machinist, notwithstanding his free
and careless disposition, till a taste for a more than adequate quantity
of strong liquor took hold of him; since when his habits had interfered
with his business sadly. Already millers went elsewhere for their gear,
and only one set of hands was now kept going, though there were formerly
two. Already he found a difficulty in meeting his men at the week's end,
and though they had been reduced in number there was barely enough work
to do for those who remained.

The sun dropped lower and vanished, the shouts of the village children
ceased to resound, darkness cloaked the students' bedroom, and all the
scene outwardly breathed peace. None knew of the fevered youthful
ambitions that throbbed in two breasts within the quiet creeper-covered
walls of the millwright's house.

In a few months the brothers left the village of their birth to enter
themselves as students in a training college for schoolmasters; first
having placed their young sister Rosa under as efficient a tuition at a
fashionable watering-place as the means at their disposal could command.

CHAPTER II

A man in semi-clerical dress was walking along the road which led from
the railway-station into a provincial town. As he walked he read
persistently, only looking up once now and then to see that he was
keeping on the foot track and to avoid other passengers. At those
moments, whoever had known the former students at the millwright's would
have perceived that one of them, Joshua Halborough, was the peripatetic
reader here.

What had been simple force in the youth's face was energized judgm