t; but it may often be to
teach them some lesson which they could not have learned without it. For
instance, suppose a very proud person were punished for telling an
untruth, which he had not really told: the humiliation might be a check
to his pride, and in that way might be for his real good.'

'And he deserved it, you mean, for being proud, though he didn't for
untruth?'

'Yes; and when he came to see this, he would no longer say it was very
hard.'

This reminded Cecil of his father's sermon, which indeed Mr. Yorke had
in his mind when he spoke. He was silent a good while, then he began on
what seemed at first another subject. 'If something that wasn't your own
fault had come to hinder you when you were being educated for a
clergyman, shouldn't you have thought you weren't meant to be one?'

'I think it would have depended on what the hindrance was, and a good
many other circumstances. It isn't only book-learning that makes people
fit to be clergymen; perhaps I might have been hindered in that, only to
make me more fit in some other way.'

'What kind of way?'

'Well, I might have needed to learn submission or humility, or a hundred
things.'

Cecil clasped both hands round his knees, and went swaying himself
backwards and forwards in a queer kind of way that was more reflective
than polite.

'I suppose it wouldn't do for a clergyman to be cock-a-hoop,' he said
presently.

'Well, not exactly, if he meant to be in any sense an example to his
flock,' returned Mr. Yorke with a smile.

'I know I was very cock-a-hoop just before this disappointment came,'
thought Cecil, 'and that last week I was careless and all. I wonder
whether that is why all this has happened!'

He did not say any of this aloud, but it was not pride that kept him
from the avowal, only a very natural and reasonable shyness of talking
about himself. He stopped rocking, and sat with his gaze fixed on the
trees in the distance, without really seeing them a bit. A new feeling
of half-dismayed contrition was springing up in his heart, but the
bitterness of resentment and the sense of injury were passing away.

He started when the church bells began to ring. There was evening
prayer, with catechizing, at three o'clock at Wilbourne Church, and
evening prayer again, with a sermon, at seven. 'Are you going, sir?' he
said as Mr. Yorke rose up.

'Not to church now, but I must be off to Bar-end, where I have my class
of hobbledehoys from the farms.