education at an inferior commercial school, and lived on his father's
farm, giving himself the airs of a sporting character, and fast
hurrying into dissipation.

He was really good-natured, and Gilbert dwelt on his kindness with
warmth and gratitude, and on his prowess in all sporting accomplishments
with a perfect effervescence of admiration. He evidently patronized
Gilbert, partly from good-natured pity, and partly as flattered by
the adherence of a boy of a grade above him; and Gilbert was proud
of the notice of one who seemed to him a man, and an adept in all
athletic games. It was a dangerous intimacy, and her heart sank as
she found that the pleasures to which he had been introducing Gilbert,
were not merely the free exercise, the rabbit-shooting and rat-hunting
of the farm, nor even the village cricket-match, all of which, in
other company, would have had her full sympathy. But there had been
such low and cruel sports that she turned her head away sickened at
the notion of any one dear to her having been engaged in such amusements,
and when Gilbert in excuse said that every one did it, she answered
indignantly, 'My brothers never!'

'It is no use talking about what swells do that hunt and shoot and go
to school,' answered Gilbert.

'Do you wish you went to school?' asked Albinia.

'I wish I was out of it all!'

He was in a very different frame. He owned that he knew how wrong it
had been to deceive, but he seemed to look upon it as a sort of fate;
he wished he could help it, but could not, he was so much afraid of