had been at school and college together, and had, since that time, met as seldom as Bertram

could manage.

In their childhood, boyhood, and youth, they had never met save to disagree, since they differed in tastes, opinion, and temperament. Bertram Bevor was by disposition easy, tolerant, glad to know people of differing characters, and inclined to weigh impartially varying views and opinions. He was also disposed, perhaps too much, to seek for adventures and try various paths in life. He desired not to influence and teach others, but to know them, and, in his constant effort to realise to himself and image forth the nature and feelings of those with whom he came into contact, he really had acquired a great power of discernment of character and motives by means of very slight external indications. One result of this observant habit was that he usually left upon people with whom he talked, or rather to whom he listened, the impression that he agreed with them, whereas his real tendency was towards

criticism and disagreement.

This was a source

of an opinion which arose concerning him, that he was inconsistent or not serious, merely amusing himself with ideas. He observed himself

as closely as others, and could spend hours by the fire recalling past scenes and actions in which he had taken part, and playing them over again in imagination with possible variations, which had not happened, and the results of these, much after the fashion of the meditations of a chess-player. He was so much in the habit of thus watching himself, detached from himself, that he did, doubtless, weaken the springs of action, and disqualified himself also for systematic thought upon abstract subjects.

In all these ways Bertram showed himself to be no true Bevor. He derived much the larger part of his character from his mother, who came partly of Irish blood.

His cousin John, on the contrary, represented the Bevor disposition in its purity. The family was of unmixedly English descent. It had

In

therefore little or no poetry or imagination. Since the time when, two or three centuries earlier, the Bevors had been Midland yeomen, they had risen by a series of marriages, invariably made with a view to the increase of property, and with never a touch of romance. the Civil War one ancestor had taken cautious part with the Presbyterian party, and after the Revolution the family had been steadily Hanoverian and Whig, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, when it became Tory. It had, since the Reform Bill, remained consistently Conservative. Lord Cumnor, the third Earl, the father of John Bevor, a dull, rather pompous, but extremely worthy man, had, though otherwise fairly prosperous, suffered throughout life under two dispensations, between which he perceived a close connectionthe career of Mr. Gladstone, and the extension and increase of the ritualistic party in the Church. This last fact was not only a theoretical but a practical inconvenience to him, because, whereas, when he first came into

his estates, he could walk to a church across his own park in a quarter of an hour, he now had to drive for four miles before he could reach a church at which he felt conscientiously able to attend. It is true that Cowslip Rectory, of which his son John was rector, was nearer, but with John, since his rectorship began, Lord Cumnor had hopelessly quarrelled on matters both of doctrine and ceremonial. Cowslip was the only living, as it happened, in Lord Cumnor's gift, and he had conferred it upon John before the rapid process had begun by which an evangelically minded curate was turned into a strong maintainer of the sacerdotal claim and practice. Lord Cumnor, like many another patron, now knew something of the feeling of Henry II. towards Becket. John, from his childhood up, had always thrown himself with concentrated vigour into the pursuit in hand. His mind was not manifold, not reflective, not self-interested or self-conscious. It was limited, applied to external work, not observant of other people, their tastes, wishes,

or characters. In the way of academic study his natural bias had been towards mathematics and mechanics, but he was fond of music and knew much about it. In poetry he most liked to read Browning, but did not, in fact, care to read poetry at all. It had always

irritated Bertram Bevor that John should discuss literature, or politics, or the characters of men, because the reflections made by his cousin never seemed to belong to him, but to be taken straight and untransformed from some authority. John had a good memory and no humour, and in their Oxford circle seemed to take special pleasure in crushing with an authority or a fact each light and paradoxical position taken up by Bertram.

When John, five or six years after he had taken Orders, had passed decidedly into the ranks of the "advanced" clergy of the High Church school, both his natural virtues, and (as they seemed to Bertram) his natural faults, were intensified by the influence of a strong profession. His practical and organising genius