atified to feel
herself blushing as she asked, 'Ah! poor Gerard--how is he?'

'As good and sincere as ever,' said Miss Nugent, 'but not much wiser.
He is so excitable and vehement.'

'Yes,' said Miss Headworth. 'I don't understand the kind of thing. In
my time a steady young clerk used to be contented after hours with
playing at cricket in the summer, or learning the flute in the
winter--and a great nuisance it was sometimes, but now Gerard must get
himself made a sort of half clergyman.'

'A reader,' suggested Mary.

'Minor orders. Oh, how delightful!' cried Nuttie.

'People, don't half understand it,' added Miss Headworth. 'Mrs.
Jeffreys will have it that he is no better than a Jesuit, and really I
did not know what to say, for he talked, to me by the hour about his
being an external brother to something.'

'Not to the Jesuits, certainly,' said Nuttie.

'Yes, I told her that; but she thinks all monks are Jesuits, you know,
and that all brothers are monks; and he does wear his cassock--his
choir cassock, I mean--when he has his service in the iron room at the
sandpits. And now he has taken up temperance, and flies about giving
the pledge, and wanting one to wear bits of blue ribbon. I told him I
never did take, and never had taken, more than a little hot wine and
water when I had a cold, and I couldn't see what good it would do to
George Jenkins and the poor fellows at the Spread Eagle if I took ever
so many vows.'

'There's a regular blue-ribbon fever set in,' said Miss Nugent. 'Gerard
told me I was supporting the cause of intemperance yesterday because I
was so wicked as to carry the rest of your bottle of port, Miss
Headworth, to poor Anne Crake.'

'Well! he is a dear boy, and youth wouldn't be youth if it were not
sometimes rather foolish,' said Miss Headworth, 'and it is better it
should be for good than evil.'

'Eager in a cause and not for selfishness,' said Mary. 'Poor Gerard, I
wonder where he will be safely landed!'

So did Nuttie, who had a secret flattering faith in being the cause of
all the poor young fellow's aberrations, and was conscious of having
begun the second volume of her life's novel. She went to bed in the
elated frame of mind proper to a heroine. There was a shade over all
in the absence of dear old Mrs. Nugent, and in Mary's deep mourning,
but there is more tenderness than poignancy in sorrow for shocks of
corn gathered in full season, and all was cheerful about her.