You
must judge for yourself. If you choose this way, I will take it on
myself to let your friends know how it is with you."

It was a bitter pill to swallow. Mr Marshall was about the last man in
his world to whom Aubrey felt any inclination to lay himself under an
obligation. Both as a clergyman, a Puritan, and an ejected minister,
this undiscerning youth had looked down exceedingly upon his superior.
The popular estimate of the clergy was just then at the lowest ebb, and
it required some moral courage for any man to take holy orders, who was
neither very high up in rank, nor very low down. This was the result
partly of the evil lives, and partly of the gross ignorance, of the
pre-Reformation priests; the lives were now greatly amended, but too
much of the ignorance, remained, and the time had not been sufficient to
remove the stigma. A clergyman was expected to apprentice his children
to a trade, or at best to place them in domestic service; and he would
have been thought forward and impertinent if, when dining with laymen in
a good position, he had not spontaneously taken his departure before
dessert made its appearance. To be indebted, therefore, for an
essential service to one of this lowly class, Aubrey was sufficiently
foolish to account a small degradation.

Happily for him, he had just enough sense left, and had been
sufficiently humiliated, to perceive that he could not escape the
necessity of devouring this unpalatable piece of humble pie, and that
the only choice left him was a choice of bitters. The false manliness
which he had been diligently cultivating had vanished into thin air, and
something of the child's spirit, so long despised, was coming back to
him,--the longing for the sound of a familiar voice, and the touch of a
tender hand. Even Aunt Temperance would have received, just then, a
welcome which might have astonished her. But it showed the character of
the women of his family that in this emergency Aubrey's thoughts
scarcely touched his mother, and dwelt longingly on his grandmother and
his Aunt Edith.

The wise Countess waited quietly till Aubrey's meditations had taken
time to settle themselves into resolution.

"Madam, I thank your Ladyship," he said at last, as he looked up, with
an expression which had not dwelt for many a month in his eyes. "I
think I perceive now how matters stand. Suffer me to say that I never
knew, until now, how foolish I have been. Under your Ladyship