"That's capital!" said Godfrey, delighted.
"Yes, and I tell you what would be capitaller. Mayhap you will have to live in London for a bit, and, if so, you are just the kind of lodger I should like, and I don't think we should quarrel about terms. I'll write you down the address of that house, the Grove as it is called, though why, I don't know, seeing there isn't a tree within half a mile, which I don't mind, as there are too many about here, making so much damp. And you'll write and let me know what you are going to do, won't you?"
"Of course I will."
"And now, look here. Likely you will want a little money till you square up things with your trustee people that the master hates so much."
"Well, I had forgotten it, but, as a matter of fact, I have only ten shillings left, and that isn't much when one is going to London," confessed Godfrey.
"I thought so; you never were one to think much of such things, and so it's probable that you'll get plenty of them, for it's what we care about we are starved in, just to make it hot for us poor humans. Take your father, for instance; he loves power, he does; he'd like to be a bishop of the old Roman sort what could torture people who didn't agree with them. And what is he? The parson of a potty parish of a couple of hundred people, counting the babies and the softies, and half of them Dissenters or Salvation Army. Moreover, they can't be bullied, because if they were they'd just walk into the next chapel door. Of course, there's the young gentlemen, and he takes it out of them, but, Lord bless us! that's like kicking a wool sack, of which any man of spirit soon gets tired. So, you see, he is sick-hearted, and will be more so now that you have stood up to him; and, in this way or that, it's the same with everyone, none of us gets what we want, while of what we don't want there's always plenty."
While the old lady held forth thus in her little room which, although she did not know it, had once been the penitential cell of the Abbey, wherein for hundreds of years many unhappy ones had reflected in a very similar vein, she was engaged in trying key after key upon a stout oak chest. It was part of the ancient furniture of the place, that indeed in former days had served as the receptacle for hair shirts, scourges and other physical inducements to repentance and piety.