always been a sorrow to me that I ever
brought Arabin into the diocese."

"I never asked you to bring him, archdeacon. But nobody was so glad
as you when he proposed to Eleanor."

"Well, the long and short of it is this, I shall tell Henry to-night
that if he makes a fool of himself with this girl, he must not look
to me any longer for an income. He has about six hundred a year of
his own, and if he chooses to throw himself away, he had better go
and live in the south of France, or in Canada, or where he pleases.
He shan't come here."

"I hope he won't marry the girl, with all my heart," said Mrs
Grantly.

"He had better not. By heavens, he had better not!"

"But if he does, you'll be the first to forgive him."

On hearing this the archdeacon slammed the door, and retired to his
washing apparatus. At the present moment he was very angry with his
wife, but then he was so accustomed to such anger, and was so well
aware that it in truth meant nothing, that it did not make him
unhappy. The archdeacon and Mrs. Grantly had now been man and wife for
more than a quarter of a century and had never in truth quarrelled.
He had the most profound respect for her judgment, and the most
implicit reliance on her conduct. She had never yet offended him, or
caused him to repent the hour in which he had made her Mrs. Grantly.
But she had come to understand that she might use a woman's privilege
with her tongue; and she used it,--not altogether to his comfort. On
the present occasion he was the more annoyed because he felt that she
might be right. "It would be a positive disgrace, and I never would
see him again," he said to himself. And yet as he said it, he knew
that he would not have the strength of character to carry him through
a prolonged quarrel with his son. "I never would see her,--never,
never!" he said to himself. "And then such an opening as he might
have at his sister's house!"

Major Grantly had been a successful man in life,--with the one
exception of having lost the mother of his child within a twelvemonth
of his marriage and within a few hours of that child's birth. He had
served in India as a very young man, and had been decorated with the
Victoria Cross. Then he had married a lady with some money, and had
left the active service of the army, with the concurring advice of
his own family and that of his wife. He had taken a small place in
his father's county, but the wife for whose comfort he had taken it
had die