I gather this
partly from what Ernest has told me, and partly from his school bills
which I remember Theobald showed me with much complaining. There was an
institution at Roughborough called the monthly merit money; the maximum
sum which a boy of Ernest's age could get was four shillings and
sixpence; several boys got four shillings and few less than sixpence, but
Ernest never got more than half-a-crown and seldom more than eighteen
pence; his average would, I should think, be about one and nine pence,
which was just too much for him to rank among the downright bad boys, but
too little to put him among the good ones.
CHAPTER XXXII
I must now return to Miss Alethea Pontifex, of whom I have said perhaps
too little hitherto, considering how great her influence upon my hero's
destiny proved to be.
On the death of her father, which happened when she was about thirty-two
years old, she parted company with her sisters, between whom and herself
there had been little sympathy, and came up to London. She was
determined, so she said, to make the rest of her life as happy as she
could, and she had clearer ideas about the best way of setting to work to
do this than women, or indeed men, generally have.
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