Miss Charlecote's education had been most anxiously
admirable.'

'Precisely so! Don't you see? Why, how dull you are for a man who has
been to Oxford!'

'I should seriously be glad to hear your view, for Owen's course has
always been inexplicable to me.'

'To you, poor Robin, who lived gratefully on the crumbs of our
advantages! The point was that to you they were crumbs, while we had a
surfeit.'

'Owen never seemed overdone. I used rather to hate him for his
faultlessness, and his familiarity with what awed my ignorance.'

'The worse for him! He was too apt a scholar, and received all
unresisting, unsifting--Anglo-Catholicism, slightly touched with
sentiment, enthusiasm for the Crusades, passive obedience--acted
faithfully up to it; imagined that to be "not a good Churchman," as he
told Charles, expressed the seven deadly sins, and that reasoning was the
deadliest of all!'

'As far as I understand you, you mean that there was not sufficient
distinction between proven and non-proven--important and unimportant.'

'You begin to perceive. If Faith be overworked, Reason kicks; and, of
course, when Owen found the Holt was not the world; that thinking was not
the exclusive privilege of demons; that habits he considered as
imperative duties were inconvenient, not to say impracticable; that his
articles of faith included much of the apocryphal,--why, there was a
general downfall!'

'Poor Miss Charlecote,' sighed Robert, 'it is a disheartening effect of
so much care.'

'She should have let him alone, then, for Uncle Kit to make a sailor of.
Then he would have had something better to do than to _think_!'

'Then you are distressed about him?' said Robert, wistfully.

'Thank you,' said she, laughing; 'but you see I am too wise ever to think
or distress myself. He'll think himself straight in time, and begin a
reconstruction from his scattered materials, I suppose, and meantime he
is a very comfortable brother, as such things go; but it is one of the
grudges I can't help owing to Honora, that such a fine fellow as that is
not an independent sailor or soldier, able to have some fun, and not
looked on as a mere dangler after the Holt.'

'I thought the reverse was clearly understood?'

'She ought to have "acted as sich." How my relatives, and yours too,
would laugh if you told them so! Not that I think, like them, that it is
Elizabethan dislike to naming a successor, nor to keep him on his good
behaviour; she