the meadow below
the house.

His very sports, too, which his father definitely encouraged, were
obviously displeasing to the grave divines who haunted the house so often
from Saturday to Monday, and spoke of high doctrinal matters at
meal-times, when, so Anthony thought, lighter subjects should prevail.
They were not interested in his horse, and Anthony never felt quite the
same again towards one good minister who in a moment of severity called
Eliza, the glorious peregrine that sat on the boy's wrist and shook her
bells, a "vanity." And so Anthony trotted off happy enough on his way to
Cambridge, of which he had heard much from Mr. Dent; and where, although
there too were divines and theology, there were boys as well who acted
plays, hunted with the hounds, and did not call high-bred hawks
"vanities."

Isabel was very different. While Anthony was cheerful and active like his
mother who had died in giving him life, she, on the other hand, was quiet
and deep like her father. She was growing up, if not into actual beauty,
at least into grace and dignity: but there were some who thought her
beautiful. She was pale with dark hair, and the great grey eyes of her
father; and she loved and lived in Anthony from the very difference
between them. She frankly could not understand the attraction of sport,
and the things that pleased her brother; she was afraid of the hawks, and
liked to stroke a horse and kiss his soft nose better than to ride him.
But, after all, Anthony liked to watch the towering bird, and to hear and
indeed increase the thunder of the hoofs across the meadows behind the
stomping hawk; and so she did her best to like them too; and she was
often torn two ways by her sympathy for the partridge on the one hand, as
it sped low and swift across the standing corn with that dread shadow
following, and her desire, on the other hand, that Anthony should not be
disappointed.

But in the deeper things of the spirit, too, there was a wide difference
between them. As Anthony fidgeted and sighed through his chair-back
morning and evening, Isabel's soul soared up to God on the wings of those
sounding phrases. She had inherited all her father's tender piety, and
lived, like him, on the most intimate terms with the spiritual world. And
though, of course, by training she was Puritan, by character she was
Puritan too. As a girl of fourteen she had gone with Anthony to see the
cleansing of the village temple. They had stood tog