red candidates, with much real or pretended reference to
certificates of qualification. He was certainly not an usher, as he was
paid three hundred a year for his work--which is quite beyond the mark
of ushers. So much was certain; but yet the word stuck in his throat and
made him uncomfortable. He did not like to reflect that he was home for
the holidays.

But he had determined that he would never come home for the holidays
again. At Christmas he would leave the school at which he had won his
appointment with so much trouble, and go into an open profession. Indeed
he had chosen his profession, and his mode of entering it. He would
become a civil engineer, and perhaps a land surveyor, and with this view
he would enter himself as a pupil in the great house of Beilby & Burton.
The terms even had been settled. He was to pay a premium of five hundred
pounds and join Mr. Burton, who was settled in the town of Stratton, for
twelve months before he placed himself in Mr. Beilby's office in London.
Stratton was less than twenty miles from Clavering. It was a comfort to
him to think that he could pay this five hundred pounds out of his own
earnings, without troubling his father. It was a comfort, even though he
had earned that money by "ushering" for the last two years.

When he left Julia Brabazon in the garden, Harry Clavering did not go at
once home to the rectory, but sauntered out all alone into the park,
intending to indulge in reminiscences of his past romance. It was all
over, that idea of having Julia Brabazon for his love; and now he had to
ask himself whether he intended to be made permanently miserable by her
wordly falseness, or whether he would borrow something of her wordly
wisdom, and agree with himself to look back on what was past as a
pleasurable excitement in his boyhood. Of course we all know that really
permanent misery was in truth out of the question. Nature had not made
him physically or mentally so poor a creature as to be incapable of a
cure. But on this occasion he decided on permanent misery. There was
about his heart--about his actual anatomical heart, with its internal
arrangement of valves and blood-vessels--a heavy dragging feeling that
almost amounted to corporeal pain, and which he described to himself as
agony. Why should this rich, debauched, disreputable lord have the power
of taking the cup from his lip, the one morsel of bread which he coveted
from his mouth, his one ingot of treasure out o