The shouts of the village-boys came in at the window, accompanied by broken laughter from loungers at the inn-door; but the brothers Halborough worked on.  
They were sitting in a bedroom of the master-millwright’s house, engaged in the untutored reading of Greek and Latin.  It was no tale of Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family that their imaginations and spurred them .  They were away at the Greek , immersed in a chapter of the and difficult Epistle to the Hebrews.
 
The Dog-day sun in its decline reached the low ceiling with sides, and the shadows of the great goat’s-willow swayed and interchanged upon the walls like a army manoeuvring.  The open which admitted the remoter sounds now brought the voice of some one close at hand.  It was their sister, a pretty girl of fourteen, who stood in the court below.
 
‘I can see the tops of your heads!  What’s the use of staying up there?  I like you not to go out with the street-boys; but do come and play with me!’
 
They treated her as an interlocutor, and put her off with some slight word.  She went away disappointed.  Presently there was a dull noise of heavy footsteps at the side of the house, and one of the brothers sat up.  ‘I fancy I hear him coming,’ he murmured, his eyes on the window.
 
A man in the light drab clothes of an old-fashioned country tradesman approached from round the corner, reeling as he came.  The elder son flushed with anger, rose from his books, and the stairs.  The younger sat on, till, after the of a few minutes, his brother re-entered the room.
 
‘Did Rosa see him?’
 
‘No.’
 
‘Nor anybody?’
 
‘No.’
 
‘What have you done with him?’
 
‘He’s in the straw-shed.  I got him in with some trouble, and he has fallen asleep.  I thought this would be the explanation of his absence!  No stones dressed for Kench, the great wheel of the saw-mills waiting for new float-boards, even the poor folk not able to get their wheeled.’
 
‘What is the use of poring over this!’ said the younger, shutting up Donnegan’s with a slap.  ‘O if we had only been able to keep mother’s nine hundred pounds, what we could have done!’
 
‘How well she had estimated the sum necessary!  Four hundred and fifty each, she thought.  And I have no doubt that we could have done it on that, with care.’
 
This loss of the nine hundred pounds was the sharp thorn of their crown.  It was a sum which their mother had with great and self-denial, by adding to a chance such other small amounts as she could lay hands on from time to time; and she had intended with the to indulge the dear wish of her heart—that of sending her sons, Joshua and Cornelius, to one of the Universities, having been informed that from four hundred to four hundred and fifty each might carry them through their terms with such great economy as she knew she could trust them to practise.  But she had died a year or two before this time, worn out by too keen a strain towards these ends; and the money, coming unreservedly into the hands of their father, had been nearly dissipated.  With its went all opportunity and hope of a university degree for the sons.
 
‘It drives me mad when I think of it,’ said Joshua, the elder.  ‘And here we work and work in our own way, and the utmost we can hope for is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible admission to a Theological college, and as despised licentiates.’
 
The anger of the elder was reflected as simple sadness in the face of the other.  ‘We can preach the Gospel as well without a on our surplices as with one,’ he said with feeble .
 
‘Preach the Gospel—true,’ said Joshua with a slight pursing of mouth.  ‘But we can’t rise!’
 
‘Let us make the best of it, and grind on.’
 
The other was silent, and they over their books again.
 
The cause of all this gloom, the millwright Halborough, now snoring in the shed, had been a thriving master-machinist, notwithstanding his free and careless , till a taste for a more than adequate quantity of strong liquor took hold of him; since when his habits had with his business sadly.  Already went elsewhere for their gear, and only one set of hands was now kept going, though there were two.  Already he found a difficulty in meeting his men at the week’s end, and though they had been reduced in number there was barely enough work to do for those who remained.
 
The sun dropped lower and vanished, the shouts of the village children ceased to , darkness cloaked the students’ bedroom, and all the scene outwardly breathed peace.  None knew of the fevered youthful ambitions that in two breasts within the quiet creeper-covered walls of the millwright’s house.
 
In a few months the brothers left the village of their birth to enter themselves as students in a training college for schoolmasters; first having placed their young sister Rosa under as efficient a tuition at a fashionable watering-place as the means at their disposal could command.