circumstances of her father's position.

But he must go to Plumstead before he could go to Allington. He
was engaged to spend his Christmas there, and must go now at once.
There was not time for the journey to Allington before he was due
at Plumstead. And, moreover, though he could not bring himself
to resolve that he would tell his father what he was going to
do;--"It would seem as though I were asking his leave!" he said to
himself;--he thought that he would make a clean breast of it to his
mother. It made him sad to think that he should cut the rope which
fastened his own boat among the other boats in the home harbour
at Plumstead, and that he should go out all alone into strange
waters,--turned adrift altogether, as it were, from the Grantly
fleet. If he could only get the promise of his mother's sympathy
for Grace it would be something. He understood,--no one better than
he,--the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world,
which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father.
And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself,
though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring.
He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London
preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a
rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter of an
earl, and who was already mentioned as a candidate for high places.
How his sister was the wife of a marquis, and a leader in the
fashionable world, the reader already knows. The archdeacon himself
was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a
bishop; and Mrs. Grantly, though there was left about her something of
an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been
hers before the stream of her days had run gold, yet she, too, had
taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of
those who construe literally that passage of scripture which tells us
of the camel and the needle's eye. Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew
himself to be his mother's favourite child,--knew himself to have
become so since something of coolness had grown up between her and
her august daughter. The augustness of the daughter had done much to
reproduce the old freshness of which I have spoken in the mother's
heart, and had specially endeared to her the son, who, of all her
children, was the least subject to the family failing. The clergyman,
Charles Grantly,--he