Thus the months went by, and grew into years less heavily than I had thought. Mr. Telgrove was well content, having found, as he would say, a refuge for his old age. For the Act of Uniformity and the Oath of Non-resistance being against his conscience, had deprived him of his living, while the Five-Mile Act had well-nigh forbidden him to find another. Mr. N. Royston, in the performance of one of his politic acts of charity, his house of Royston Chase being neither near Mr. Telgrove's former incumbency, nor within the proscribed distance of a corporate town, had obtained a good teacher for his son; but I think the good man's power of struggling with a persecuting world was exhausted in his one act of renunciation, and he was left with little desire for aught but a peaceful abode and the leisure to study the great writers of antiquity in a cloud of smoke from his tobacco pipe. His opinions in matters theological and ecclesiastical had, with the passage of time, so softened, that Sir Michael would playfully attack him for a Latitudinarian, an Arminian, or what not, while I on winter evenings would search among my tutor's books that I might plague him with accusation of strange heresies.
But this was after Mr. Telgrove had resided with us some four years, and young Mr. Royston had proceeded from Sherborne to Corpus Christi College, in the University of Oxford, having in the meantime but once visited Royston--one happy summer for me, in my fourteenth year, during two months of which he would ride over to us, not indeed with the frequency of the past, but often twice, and sometimes even three times, in the seven days. Yet, though I say I was happy, it was not as it had been. Something of the distance that had grown between him and me would force itself upon the mind, now of one, now of the other. Pondering the matter from the watch-tower of my present content, I hold that the child in Mistress Phil was ever crying out for the older terms of alliance, with their reckless mirth and unchecked license of jollity, while the woman, unheeded, but waxing ever stronger within, would as often clap stern hand upon the clamorous lips of youth, and so produce that outward show of petulance which is as baffling to the youth in his twentieth as it is alluring to the man in his thirtieth year. Then, too, it was that I first gave thought to the manner of my appearance in the eyes of others, and would ask my glass, I knew not why, for evidence of grace and beauty in person and countenance. And the mirror was a stern arbiter, showing only gaunt length of limb and sunbrowned uncouthness of feature, overhung by heavy brows, and supported, when mirth would display them, by a regiment of very white teeth.
