'I wonder if Dolores will have it!' said Gillian. 'I suppose she will
know much more than we do.'

'Probably, being the only child of such parents, and with every
advantage London can give. Maurice was always much the cleverest of us
all, and with a very strong mechanical and scientific turn, so that I
now think it might have been better to have let him follow his bent.
But when we were young there was a good deal of mistrust of anything
outside the beaten tracks of gentlemanlike professions, and my dear old
father did not like what he heard of the course of study for those
lines. Things were not as they are now. So Maurice went to Cambridge,
and was fifth wrangler of his year, and then had to go to the bar. It
somehow always gave him a thwarted, injured feeling of working against
the grain, and he cultivated all these scientific pursuits to the
utmost, getting more and more into opinions and society that distressed
grandpapa and Uncle William. So he fell in with Mr. Hay, a professor
at a German university. I can hear William's tone of utter contempt
and disgust. I believe this poor man was exceedingly learned, and had
made some remarkable discoveries, but he was very poor, and lived in
lodgings at Bonn with his daughter in the small way people are content
to do in Germany. As to his opinions, we all took it for granted that
he was a freethinker; but I can't tell how that might be. Maurice
lodged in the same house one year when he went to learn German and
attend lectures, and he went back again every long vacation. At last
came your dear grandfather's death. Maurice hurried away from
Beechcroft immediately after the funeral, and the next thing that was
heard of him was that he had married Miss Hay. It was no wonder that
your Uncle William was bitterly hurt and offended at the apparent
disrespect to our father, and would make no move towards Maurice.'