weak will, favored her younger son in secret;
she learned by experience that open intervention on his behalf did more
harm than good.

Desmond had two habits which especially moved his brother to anger. He
was fond of roaming the country alone for hours together; he was fond of
reading. To Richard each was a waste of time. He never opened a book,
save a manual of husbandry or a ready reckoner; he could conceive of no
reason for walking, unless it were the business of the farm. Nothing
irritated him more than to see Desmond stretched at length with his nose
in Mr. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or a volume of Hakluyt's Voyages, or
perhaps Mr. Oldys's Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. And as he himself never
dreamed by day or by night, there was no chance of his divining the fact
that Desmond, on those long solitary walks of his, was engaged chiefly in
dreaming, not idly, for in his dreams he was always the center of
activity, greedy for doing.

These daydreams constituted almost the sole joy of Desmond's life. When
he was only a little fellow he would sprawl on the bank near Tyrley
Castle and weave romances about the Norman barons whose home it had
been--romances in which he bore a strenuous part. He knew every
interesting spot in the neighborhood: Salisbury Hill, where the Yorkist
leader pitched his camp before the battle of Blore Heath; Audley Brow,
where Audley the Lancastrian lay watching his foe; above all Styche Hall,
whence a former Clive had ridden forth to battle against the king, and
where his namesake, the present Robert Clive, had been born. He imagined
himself each of those bold warriors in turn, and saw himself, now a
knight in mail, now a gay cavalier of Rupert's, now a bewigged Georgian
gentleman in frock and pantaloons, but always with sword in hand.

No name sang a merrier tune in Desmond's imagination than the name of
Robert Clive. Three years before, when he was imbibing Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew under Mr. Burslem at the grammar school on the hill, the amazing
news came one day that Bob Clive, the wild boy who had terrorized the
tradespeople, plagued his master, led the school in tremendous fights
with the town boys, and suffered more birchings than any scholar of his
time--Bob Clive, the scapegrace who had been packed off to India as a
last resource, had turned out, as his father said, "not such a booby
after all"--had indeed proved himself to be a military genius. How
Desmond thrilled when the old scho