you choose to claim the strict letter
        of the law, and act without consideration for your father's feelings,
        you must not be surprised if you one day find that I have claimed a like
        liberty for myself. Believe me your affectionate father,
                                                                   G. Pontifex.«
 
I found this letter along with those already given and a few more which I need
not give, but throughout which the same tone prevails, and in all of which there
is the more or less obvious shake of the will near the end of the letter.
Remembering Theobald's general dumbness concerning his father for the many years
I knew him after his father's death, there was an eloquence in the preservation
of these letters and in their endorsement, letters from my father, which seemed
to have with it some faint odour of health and nature.
    Theobald did not show his father's letter to Christina, nor, indeed, I
believe, to anyone. He was by nature secretive, and had been repressed too much
and too early to be capable of railing or blowing off steam where his father was
concerned. His sense of wrong was still inarticulate, felt as a dull dead weight
ever present day by day, and if he woke at night-time still continually present,
but he hardly knew what it was. I was about the closest friend he had, and I saw
but little of him, for I could not get on with him for long together: he said I
had no reverence; whereas I thought I had plenty of reverence for what deserved
being revered, but that the gods which he deemed golden were in reality made of
baser metal. He never, as I have said, complained of his father to me, and his
only other friends were like himself staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies,
and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of insubordination
to parents - good young men, in fact - and one cannot blow off steam to a good
young man.
    When Christina was informed by her lover of his father's opposition, and of
the time which must probably elapse before they could be married, she offered -
with how much sincerity I know not - to set him free from his engagement - but
Theobald declined to be released - »not at least,« as he said, »at present.«
Christina and Mrs. Allaby knew they could manage him, and on this not very
satisfactory footing the engagement was continued.
    His engagement, and his refusal to be released at once, raised Theobald in
his own good opinion. Dull as he