no one is ill,' said James, withdrawing his hands, and kneeling
down by his box, with an air of feigned indifference; 'I am only going
to London.'

'To London?'

'Aye, to see what is to be done,--ship--chaplaincy, curacy, literature,
selling sermons at five shillings each,--what not. I am no longer
master of Northwold school!' He strove to speak carelessly, but
bending over his packing, thrust down the clothes with desperate blows.

Louis sat down, too much dismayed to utter a word.

'One morning's work in the conclave,' said James, with the same assumed
ease. 'Here's their polite reprimand, which they expected me to put up
with,--censuring all my labour, forbidding Sunday-classes, accusing me
of partiality and cruelty, with a lot of nonsense about corporal
punishment and dignity. I made answer, that if I were master at all, I
must be at liberty to follow my own views, otherwise I would resign;
and, would you believe it, they snapped at the offer--they thought it
highly desirable! There's an end of it.'

'Impossible!' cried Louis, casting his eye over the reprimand, and
finding that the expressions scarcely warranted James's abstract of
them. 'You must have mistaken!'

'Do you doubt _that_?' and James threw to him a sheet where, in
Richardson's clerkly handwriting, the trustees of King Edward's
Northwold Grammar School formally accepted the resignation of the
Reverend James Roland Frost Dynevor.

'They cannot be so hasty! Did not Mr. Calcott call to gee you?'

'An old humbug!'

'I'll go and see him this instant. Something may be done.'

'No,' said James, holding him down by the shoulder, 'I will not be
degraded by vain solicitations.'

'This must be that wretched Ramsbotham!' exclaimed Louis. 'Oh, Jem! I
little thought he had so much power to injure you.'

'It is as well you did not,' said James. 'It would have made no
difference, except in the pain it would have cost you; and the only
gratification in this business is, that I suffer because neither you
nor I would deny our principles. I thank you, Fitzjocelyn!' and he
straightened himself in the satisfaction of persecuted rectitude.

'You have very little to thank me for,' said Louis, wringing his hand,
and turning aside, as if unable yet to face the full extent of the evil.

'Never fear for us,' continued James, boldly; 'we shall struggle on.
Mens conscia,--you see I can't forget to be a schoolmaster.'

'But what are you about? Where are y