proof that no one was above suspicion,--not even the greatly respected
head of one of the first colleges in the world.

After that dreadful fiasco in the schools, Warrender continued to keep
his terms very quietly; seeing very few people, making very few friends,
reading after his own fashion with an obstinate indifference to all
systems of study, and shutting his eyes persistently to the near approach
of the final ordeal. Things were in this condition when he received a
sudden telegram calling him home. "Come at once, or you will be too
late," was the message. The Rector, to whom he rushed at once, looked
at it coldly. He was not fond of giving an undergraduate leave in the
middle of the term. "The college could have wished for a more definite
message," he said. "Too late for what, Mr. Warrender?" "Too late to see
my father alive, sir!" cried the young man; and as this had all the
definiteness that the college required he was allowed to go. This was
how his studies were broken up just as they approached their conclusion,
although, as he had been so capricious and self-willed, nobody expected
that in any circumstances it could have been a very satisfactory close.

CHAPTER II.

The elder Mr. Warrender was a country gentleman of an undistinguished
kind. The county gentry of England is a very comprehensive class. It
includes the very best and most delightful of English men and English
women, the truest nobility, the finest gentlemen; but it also includes
a number of beings the most limited, dull, and commonplace that human
experience knows. In some cases they are people who do well to be proud
of the generation of gentlefolk through whom they trace their line, and
who have transmitted to them not only the habit of command, but the
habit of protection, and that easy grace of living which is not to be
acquired at first hand; and there are some whose forefathers have handed
down nothing but so many farms and fields, and various traditions, in
which father and son follow each other, each smaller and more petty of
soul than he that went before. The family at the Warren were of this
class. They were acknowledged gentry, beyond all question, but their
estates and means were small and their souls smaller. Their income never
reached a higher level than about fifteen hundred a year. Their paternal
home was a house of rather mean appearance, rebuilt on the ruins of the
old one in the end of last century, and consequently as