d Jack,
presently.

"We will not talk about that," said the clergyman.

Jack looked disposed for a moment to persevere in his demand, but the
father's troubled face disarmed him.

"Poor Edward has had great disadvantages," he began, in a half-
apologetic, half-melancholy way, "and I often fear I am to blame. I
have thought too much of my work out of doors, and too little of my duty
to him. I have not been to him all that a father should be."

He said this more in the way of talking to himself than of addressing
us. But I saw Jack colour up at the last reference, and hastened to
change the subject.

We felt quite sorry for him when he rose to go. He evidently knew his
son's failings only too well, and with a father's love tried to cover
them. And I could see how in all he said he was almost pleading with us
to befriend his boy.

To me it was more than painful to hear him talk thus--to speak to me as
if I was a paragon of virtue, and to apologise to _me_ for the defects
of his own son. It was more than I could endure; and when he started to
go I asked if I might walk with him.

He gladly assented, and then I poured into his ears the whole story of
my follies and struggles and troubles in London.

I shall never forget the kind way in which he listened and the still
kinder way in which he talked when he had heard all.

I am not going to repeat that talk here; the reader may guess for
himself what a simple Christian minister would have to say to one in my
case, and how he would say it. He neither preached nor lectured, and he
broke out into no exclamations. Had he done so, I should probably have
been flurried and frightened away. But he talked to me as a father to
his son--or rather as a big brother to a young one--entering into all my
troubles and difficulties, and even claiming a share in them himself.

It was a long time since I had had such a talk with any one, and it did
me good.

An uneventful week or two followed. We occasionally saw Mr Hawkesbury
at our lodgings, for Smith could never bring himself to the point of
again visiting the rectory. Indeed, he was now so busily engaged in the
evenings preparing for his coming examination that he had time for
nothing, and even the education of the lively Billy temporarily devolved
on me.

It was not till after a regular battle royal that that young gentleman
could be brought to submit to be "larned" by any one but his own special
"bloke," and even w