Publisher's Synopsis
Anthony Norris, who was now about fourteen, went up to King's College, Cambridge, inOctober. He was closeted long with his father the night before he left, and received from him muchsound religious advice and exhortation; and in the morning, after an almost broken-hearted goodbye from Isabel, he rode out with his servant following on another horse and leading a packhorse onthe saddle of which the falcons swayed and staggered, and up the curving drive that led round intothe village green. He was a good-hearted and wholesome-minded boy, and left a real ache behindhim in the Dower House.Isabel indeed ran up to his room, after she had seen his feathered cap disappear at a trot throughthe gate, leaving her father in the hall; and after shutting and latching the door, threw herself on hisbed, and sobbed her heart out. They had never been long separated before. For the last three yearshe had gone over to the Rectory morning by morning to be instructed by Mr. Dent; but now, although he would never make a great scholar, his father thought it well to send him up toCambridge for two or three years, that he might learn to find his own level in the world.Anthony himself was eager to go. If the truth must be told, he fretted a little against the restraintsof even such a moderate Puritan household as that of his father's. It was a considerable weariness toAnthony to kneel in the hall on a fresh morning while his father read, even though with fervour andsincerity, long extracts from "Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations," collected by the ReverendHenry Bull, when the real world, as Anthony knew it, laughed and rippled and twinkled outside inthe humming summer air of the lawn and orchard; or to have to listen to godly discourses, howeveredifying to elder persons, just at the time when the ghost-moth was beginning to glimmer in thedusk, and the heavy trout to suck down his supper in the glooming pool in the meadow below thehouse
