 was nothing; and
he smiled as he dressed himself leisurely, thinking it all over. Somehow
everything looked perfectly easy to him this time; last time he had been
plunged into tragic despair; now, and he did not know why, he took it
quite easily; he seemed to fear nothing. There were various ways of
getting the money as natural as the daylight, and in the mean time why
should he make himself unhappy? As soon as he was ready he went to his
room and had another look at the book-case which, with his best books in
it, all in order and ranged in unbroken lines, looked everything a
book-case ought to look. It made him feel more of a man somehow, more
like the gentleman and scholar he had meant to be when he started in
life; he had not intended then to be a poor district incumbent all his
life, with a family of eight children. His book-case somehow transported
him back to the days when he had thought of better things for himself,
and when life had held an ideal for him. Perhaps at the best of times it
had never been a very high ideal; but when a man is over fifty and has
given up doing anything but struggle through each day as it comes, and
get out of his work as best he may, doing what he must, leaving undone
what he can, any ideal almost seems something higher than himself; but
the recollection of what he had meant to be, came back to him strongly
when he looked at his carved oak. It had not been carried out; but still
he felt rehabilitated and better in his own opinion as he stood beside
this costly purchase he had made, and felt that it changed his room and
all his surroundings. It might have been almost wicked to run into such
an extravagance, but yet it did him good.

"My people came down to the Hall last night," Clarence Copperhead said
to him at breakfast, "and the Governor is coming over along with Sir
Robert. He'd like to see you, I am sure, and I suppose they'll be going
in for sight-seeing, and that sort of thing. He is a dab at
sight-seeing, is the Governor. I can't think how he can stand it for my
part."
