I 'm sure I know you're thinking what's manly. Fancy
me keeping his money, and you not marrying him! I wouldn't mind driving a
plough. I shouldn't make a bad gamekeeper. Of course I love boats best, but you
can't have everything.«
    »Speak to Mr. Whitford first,« said Clara, too proud of the boy for growing
as she had trained him, to advise a course of conduct opposed to his notions of
manliness, though now that her battle was over she would gladly have acquiesced
in little casuistic compromises for the sake of the general peace.
    Some time later Vernon and Dr. Corney were arguing upon the question. Corney
was dead against the sentimental view of the morality of the case propounded by
Vernon as coming from Miss Middleton and partly shared by him. »If it's on the
boy's mind,« Vernon said, »I can't prohibit his going to Willoughby and making a
clean breast of it, especially as it involves me, and sooner or later I should
have to tell him myself.«
    Dr. Corney said no at all points. »Now hear me,« he said finally. »This is
between ourselves, and no breach of confidence, which I 'd not be guilty of for
forty friends, though I 'd give my hand from the wrist-joint for one - my left,
that's to say. Sir Willoughby puts me one or two searching interrogations on a
point of interest to him, his house and name. Very well, and good-night to that,
and I wish Miss Dale had been ten years younger, or had passed the ten with no
heartrisings and sinkings wearing to the tissues of the frame and the moral
fibre to boot. She'll have a fairish health, with a little occasional doctoring;
taking her rank and wealth in right earnest, and shying her pen back to Mother
Goose. She'll do. And, by the way, I think it's to the credit of my sagacity
that I fetched Mr. Dale here fully primed, and roused the neighbourhood, which I
did, and so fixed our gentleman, neat as a prodded eel on a pair of prongs -
namely, the positive fact and the general knowledge of it. But mark me, my
friend. We understand one another at a nod. This boy, young Squire Crossjay, is
a good stiff hearty kind of a Saxon boy, out of whom you may cut as gallant a
fellow as ever wore epaulettes