r, as a checking and disapproving influence, not to
be provoked, but equally not to be trusted. Hugh had no confidences
with his father; he never felt sure, if he gave way to easy and
unconstrained talk with him, that his father would not suddenly discern
something of levity and frivolity in his pursuits; and this developed
in Hugh a gentle hypocrisy, that was indeed the shadow of his sympathy,
which made him divine what would please his father to talk about. He
found all his old letters after his father's death, arranged and
docketed--the thought of the unexpected tenderness which had prompted
this care filled his eyes with sudden tears--but how unreal they
seemed! There was nothing of himself in them, though they were written
with a calculated easiness of expression which made him feel ashamed.

And it was even the same with his idea of God. He never thought of Him
as the giver of beautiful things, as the inspirer of happy friendships;
he rather regarded Him as the liberal dispenser of disappointments, of
rainy days, of reproofs, of failures. It was natural enough in a place
like a public school, where the masters set the boys an example of
awkward reticence on serious matters. Even Hugh's house-master, a
conscientious, devoted man, who, in the time of expansion, was taken
into the circle of his sincere friendships--even he never said a
serious word to the boy, except with a constrained and official air as
though he heartily disliked the subject.

It is no part of this slender history to trace the outer life of Hugh
Neville. It must suffice to say that, by the time that he rose to the
top of the school, he appeared a wholesome, manly, dignified boy, quiet
and unobtrusive; very few suspected him of taking anything but a simple
and conventional view of the scheme of things; and indeed Hugh's view
at this time was, if not exactly conventional, at least unreflective.
It was his second time of harvest. He had gathered in, in his
childhood, a whole treasure of beautiful and delicate impressions of
nature. Now he cared little for nature, except as a quiet background
for the drama which was proceeding, and which absorbed all his
thoughts. What he was now garnering was impressions of personalities
and characters, the odd perversities that often surprisingly revealed
themselves, the strange generosities and noblenesses that sometimes
made themselves felt. But an English public school is hardly a place
where these la