lay
aside his school-books and recommence his education under other
teachers. As yet he was whole-hearted in the pursuit of learning. The
intellectual audacity which was wont to be the key-note of his
conversation did not, as his detractors held, indicate mere
bumptiousness and defect of self-measurement; it was simply the florid
redundancy of a young mind which glories in its strength, and plays at
victory in anticipation. It was true that he could not brook the
semblance of inferiority; if it were only five minutes' chat in the
Quad, he must come off with a phrase or an epigram; so those duller
heads who called Athel affected were not wholly without their
justification. Those who shrugged their shoulders with the remark that
he was overdoing it, and would not last out to the end of the race,
enjoyed a more indisputable triumph. One evening, when Athel was taking
the brilliant lead in an argument on 'Fate, free-will, foreknowledge
absolute,' his brain began to whirl, tobacco-smoke seemed to have dulled
all the lights before his eyes, and he fell from his chair in a
fainting-fit.

He needed nothing but rest; that, however, was imperative. Mr. Athel
brought him to London, and the family went down at once to their house
in Surrey. Wilfrid was an only son and an only child. His father had
been a widower for nearly ten years; for the last three his house had
been directed by a widowed sister, Mrs. Rossall, who had twin girls. Mr.
Athel found it no particular hardship to get away from town and pursue
his work at The Firs, a delightful house in the midst of Surrey's
fairest scenery, nor would Mrs. Rossall allow that the surrender of high
season cost her any effort. This lady had just completed her
thirty-second year; her girls were in their tenth. She was comely and
knew it, but a constitutional indolence had preserved her from becoming
a woman of fashion, and had nurtured in her a reflective mood, which, if
it led to no marked originality of thought, at all events contributed to
an appearance of culture. At the time of her husband's death she was at
the point where graceful inactivity so often degenerates into
slovenliness. Mrs. Rossall's homekeeping tendencies and the growing
childhood of her twins tended to persuade her that her youth was gone;
even the new spring fashions stirred her to but languid interest, and
her music, in which she had some attainments, was all but laid aside.
With widowhood began a new phase of her