To return to the Squire. Occupied as he now was, he recovered his former health, and something of his former cheerfulness. If Osborne had met him half-way, it is probable that the old bond between father and son might have been renewed; but Osborne either was really an invalid, or had sunk into invalid habits, and made no effort to rally. If his father urged him to go out—nay, once or twice he gulped down his pride, and asked Osborne to accompany him—Osborne would go to the window and find out some flaw or speck in the wind or weather, and make that an excuse for stopping indoors over his books. He would saunter out on the sunny side of the house, in a manner that the Squire considered as both indolent and unmanly. Yet, if there was a prospect of his leaving home, which he did pretty often about this time, he was seized with a hectic energy: the clouds in the sky, the easterly wind, the dampness of the air, were nothing to him then; and, as the Squire did not know the real secret cause of this anxiety to be gone, he took it into his head that it arose from Osborne’s dislike to Hamley and to the monotony of his father’s society.

“It was a mistake,” thought the Squire. “I see it now. I was never great at making friends myself; I always thought those Oxford and Cambridge men turned up their noses at me for a country-booby, and I’d get the start and have none o’ them. But when the boys went to Rugby and Cambridge, I should ha’ let them have their own friends about ’em, even though they might ha’ looked down on me; it was the worst they could ha’ done to me; and now, what few friends I had have fallen off from me, by death or somehow, and it is but dreary work for a young man, I grant it. But he might try not to show it so plain to me as he does. I’m getting case-hardened; but it does cut me to the quick sometimes—it does. And he so fond of his dad as he was once! If I can but get the land drained, I’ll make him an allowance, and let him go to London, or where he likes. Maybe he’ll do better this time, or maybe he’ll go to the dogs altogether; but perhaps it will make him think a bit kindly of the old father at home—I should like him to do that, I should!”

It is possible that Osborne might have been induced to tell his father of his marriage during their long solitary intercourse, if the Squire, in an unlucky moment, had not given him his confidence about Roger’s engagement with Cynthia. It was on one wet Sunday afternoon, when the father and son were sitting together in the large empty drawing-room: Osborne had not been to church in the morning; the Squire had, and he was now trying hard to read one of Blair’s sermons. They had dined early; they always did on Sundays; and either that, or the sermon, or the hopeless wetness of the day, made the afternoon seem interminably long to him. He had certain unwritten rules for the regulation of his conduct on Sundays. Cold meat, sermon-reading, no smoking till after evening-prayers, as little thought as possible as to the state of the land and the condition of the crops, and as much respectable sitting-indoors in his best clothes as was consistent with going to church twice a day, and saying the responses louder than the clerk. To-day, it had rained so unceasingly that he had remitted the afternoon church; but oh, even with the luxury of a nap, how long it seemed before he saw the Hall servants trudging homewards, along the field-path, a covey of umbrellas! He had been standing at the window for the last half-hour, his hands in his pockets, and his mouth often contracting itself into the traditional sin of a whistle, but as often checked into sudden gravity—ending, nine times out of ten, in a yawn. He looked askance at Osborne, who was sitting near the fire absorbed in a book. The poor Squire was something like the little boy in the child’s story, who asks all sorts of birds and beasts to come and play with him; and, in every case, receives the sober answer, that they are too busy to have leisure for trivial amusements. The father wanted the son to put down his book, and talk to him: it was so wet, so dull, and a little conversation would so wile away the time! But Osborne, with his back to the window where his father was standing, saw nothing of all this, and went on reading. He had assented to his father’s remark that it was a very wet afternoon, but had not carried on the subject into all the varieties of truisms of which it was susceptible. Something more rousing must be started, and this the Squire felt. The recollection of the affair between Roger and Cynthia came into his head, and, without giving it a moment’s consideration, he began—

“Osborne! Do you know anything about this—this attachment of Roger’s?”

Quite successful. Osborne laid down his book in a moment, and turned round to his father.