your letter convinces me that you are
under the influence of a morbid sensitiveness which is one of the
devil's favourite devices for luring people to their destruction. I
have, as you say, been at great expense with your education. Nothing
has been spared by me to give you the advantages, which, as an English
gentleman, I was anxious to afford my son, but I am not prepared to
see that expense thrown away and to have to begin again from the
beginning, merely because you have taken some foolish scruples into
your head, which you should resist as no less unjust to yourself than
to me.

"Don't give way to that restless desire for change which is the bane
of so many persons of both sexes at the present day.

"Of course you needn't be ordained: nobody will compel you; you are
perfectly free; you are twenty-three years of age, and should know
your own mind; but why not have known it sooner, instead of never so
much as breathing a hint of opposition until I have had all the
expense of sending you to the University, which I should never have
done unless I had believed you to have made up your mind about taking
orders? I have letters from you in which you express the most perfect
willingness to be ordained, and your brother and sisters will bear me
out in saying that no pressure of any sort has been put upon you. You
mistake your own mind, and are suffering from a nervous timidity which
may be very natural but may not the less be pregnant with serious
consequences to yourself. I am not at all well, and the anxiety
occasioned by your letter is naturally preying upon me. May God guide
you to a better judgement.--Your affectionate father, G. PONTIFEX."

On the receipt of this letter Theobald plucked up his spirits. "My
father," he said to himself, "tells me I need not be ordained if I do not
like. I do not like, and therefore I will not be ordained. But what was
the meaning of the words 'pregnant with serious consequences to
yourself'? Did there lurk a threat under these words--though it was
impossible to lay hold of it or of them? Were they not intended to
produce all the effect of a threat without being actually threatening?"

Theobald knew his father well enough to be little likely to misapprehend
his meaning, but having ventured so far on the path of opposition, and
being really anxious to get out of being ordained if he could, he
determine