Chapter II

The world is like a huge theatrical company in which half the actors and actresses have been cast for the wrong parts. There are heavy fathers who ought to be playing the lover, and young men on whose downy chins one seems to see the spectre of the grey beard that would be suitable to their natures. Perhaps the hardest case is theirs who by their sex are called upon to ‘have a swaggering and martial outside,’ ‘a gallant curtle-axe upon their thigh,’ and yet, like Rosalind in her boy’s dress, start and turn faint at the sight of blood. The right to be a coward is one of the dearest prerogatives of woman. No man may be one with impunity, and it is precisely the women who are the first to despise him if he be. Those who are born with the gift of personal courage (and they are happily the greater number) have no adequate idea of their blessing. To be in harmony with one’s environment, to like the things one ought to like--that surely is the supreme good. If that be so, then few people have come into the arena of life less suitably equipped for the part they had to play than the subject of this history.

Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, for all his imposing list of names and titles started in life without that crowning gift--wanting which all effort is paralysed--a good conceit of himself. And in fact, except for the gewgaw of his rank, which sat on him as uneasily as a suit of his ancestral armour, he had not much that would win him consideration from the people among whom his lot was cast. From his father he inherited his feeble constitution, his irresolution and want of moral courage, from his mother her sallow complexion and lack of charm, her reserve and shyness, and the rigid conscience which a long line of Covenanting ancestors had passed down to her, and which in him, who had none of their counterbalancing force of character, tended always to become morbid. In his babyhood he had been called Lord St. Edmunds, as was the custom in the family for the eldest son’s eldest son; his father in half derisive affection had abbreviated the title into ‘Sainty,’ and Sainty he always continued to be to all who were intimate enough and to many who were not. He was only three when his father died, and his baby brother, Arthur, was not yet two. Even in those early days the contrast was strongly marked between the brothers. Sainty was a pale nervous child who cried if spoken to suddenly, while Arthur was as fine a pink and white fat baby as you could see in a picture-book, who crowed and gurgled and clapped his hands and liked his bath and took kindly to his food, so that the nurses adored him. When he had a stomach-ache or was thwarted in his wishes he roared lustily for a minute or two and then returned to his usual placidity, whereas poor Sainty if anything ‘put him out,’ as his nurse would say, whined and fretted, and kept up a little sad bleating cry for hours.

He could not remember his father, but with the help of the large coloured portrait in uniform that stood on a gilt easel in the corner of his mother’s room he had built up for himself a shadowy heroic figure, strangely unlike poor Charmington, which in his imagination did duty for this departed parent. He never spoke of him to any one but Arthur, but to him he talked with such conviction of ‘Papa,’ that the child, not very attentive and perhaps not greatly interested, gathered an impression that the elder boy was drawing on his memory for his facts, and indeed he almost thought so himself, until one day Lady Charmington, hearing some such talk between the two, sharply rebuked poor Sainty for telling falsehoods to his little brother. His earliest impression of his mother was in her black dress with the gleaming white on head and throat and wrists, a dress that lent a dignity to Lady Charmington’s somewhat commonplace figure. When she left off her cap, it was of the nature of a blow to him. Though he could not have described his sensations, she seemed somehow discrowned with her sleek, bare head.

Grandpapa’s funeral was a different matter from these early fleeting impressions. That he remembered clearly, for he was seven when it happened, and had a little black suit of knickerbockers and black stockings and gloves, and led Arthur by the hand similarly attired. Every incident of that frightening, gloomy, yet strangely fascinating and exciting day, remained engraved in his recollection. He remembered the crowd in the churchyard, the murmur that greeted his own appearance, the staggering of the bearers under that long heavy burthen, the gloom of the church full of people in black, and the great yawning hole in the chancel pavement. What he did not grasp until very long afterwards, and then only most imperfectly and by degrees, was the difference the event of that day made in his own position; but his mother realised it fully, and indeed it made much more difference to her than to the meek little boy accustomed from earliest infancy to swallow distasteful puddings and nauseous drugs at her command, and anxiously to examine his conscience, if some remnant of the old Adam ever led him to question her decrees. Henceforth Lady Charmington entered into her kingdom, and it must be confessed that on the whole she ruled it well and wisely, and entirely in the interests of her children. Almost the only sensible thing the old lord had ever done was to appoint her and her brother the guardians of his grandchildren, and under the careful management of his daughter-in-law, aided by the wise advice of Lord Corstorphine, the property was nursed through his grandson’s long minority back to a tolerably healthy condition.

As to Lady Belchamber, nothing would have bored her more than being cumbered in any way with the guardianship of her grandchildren. She carried off what her daughter-in-law declared to be a most ridiculously disproportionate jointure, and the furniture of her private apartments, in which some valuable china and cabinets, that she had certainly not brought into the family, somehow found themselves included at the time of the move. She even showed a decided inclination to keep the famous emeralds which, as Lady Charmington said, everybody knew were heirlooms; but these she was made to send back, by her second husband, the Duke of Sunborough, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, whom she married just a year after her lord’s death. On the other hand, she generously abandoned all claim to a damp and mouldy dower-house in which she had a right to reside for life, which, considering that the duke had a palace in London and five country seats, was very handsome of her. Three generations of gambling and extravagance leave their mark on the most imposing fortunes, and if the Belchamber estates did not come to the hammer, it was due to the action of the last person who might have been expected to save them, in marrying a hardheaded Scotswoman and dying before his father. To get the estate into order was Lady Charmington’s prime object in life. To this end she inaugurated a rigid system of economy, and made a clean sweep of the heads of almost every department under the old _régime_, toiling early and late to make herself mistress of many details of which she was ignorant; for this, she endured the dislike of the poor, whom she benefited in her own autocratic manner, and much hostile comment from her equals. She was rigidly just, and generous too in her own way; only prodigality and waste she would not tolerate, nor look with a lenient eye on the small peculations which those who serve the great come to regard as quite within the pale of honesty.

If the mother spared neither time nor labour that she might be able to hand over his property to her son free of encumbrances when he came of age, she was not less eager and indefatigable in her efforts to fit him for the position she was making for him; and this task she found incomparably the harder of the two. It was not that he was naughty or insubordinate. A meeker, more obedient child did not live. The difficulty was far more intangible; it is easier to drive a slightly pulling horse in crowded thoroughfares than one with so light a mouth that he never will go properly up to his bit; and Lady Charmington had not the blessed gift of light hands in conducting the education of a child, whatever she might have on horseback. As a girl she had ridden a good deal, and even hunted; and though she gave that up after her marriage, she still found it possible to keep a more effectual eye on all corners of the huge estate from her square seat on the back of a substantial cob than from any other coign of vantage. No farmer ever rode more diligently and thoroughly about his fields; and on these excursions it was her pleasure that the boys, and especially Sainty, should accompany her. Arthur had a natural seat, took to horses from the first, and wanted to gallop his pony and make him jump before the family coachman had thought fit to abandon the leading-rein. With poor Sainty it was far otherwise. He rode, as he ate rice pudding, because he was told to; but he was cold for an hour beforehand, and he sat his pony, as his mother remarked, like a sack of potatoes. The smallest thing unseated him; he was always rolling ignominiously off.

On this and similar shortcomings, he received many admonitions from his mother and uncle, from which the chief impression he derived was a rooted belief in the immense superiority of his younger brother. ‘At the worst there will always be Arthur.’ When and under what circumstances had he overheard that remark? He never was quite sure that he had not formulated it for himself. Be that as it might, it early became the burthen to which his life set itself. Far from resenting the point of view, he drew from it a certain consolation under his abiding sense of his many imperfections. He was still quite a small boy when he decided that his _rôle_ in life would be to die young, and make way for the younger brother who was so eminently fitted for the position that suited himself so ill; and he found a certain gloomy satisfaction in settling the details of pathetic deathbed scenes. I fear an element in these imaginings which was not without attraction for him, was the thought of exhorting Arthur with his latest breath on matters in which his brother’s conduct did not always square with his own more evangelical standard, such as a certain looseness of statement, and somewhat lax ideas of property. If Arthur could not find his own cap, or bat, or riding-whip (and his things were generally tossed about the great house, wherever he happened to be when he last used them), it was always less trouble to take Sainty’s, which were sure to be in the right place, than to go and look for his own. He also on occasion carried the juvenile habit of untruth rather further than mere thoughtlessness warranted; but he told his stories with so open a countenance, and such a fearless gaze, that he was invariably believed, as against poor Sainty, whose knitted brow and downcast eyes, while he sought in his mind for the exact truth, had all the appearance of an effort after invention. ‘Arthur is very thoughtless and tiresome,’ Lady Charmington would say, ‘but there’s one comfort about him, I can always depend on his telling me the truth if I ask him. I wish I could say the same for Sainty; I am sometimes afraid he is rather sly. I try not to be hard on him, for he is timid, and I don’t want to frighten him into telling untruths; but I do wish he was a little more straightforward, and would look one in the face when he talks.’

Many such hints, all showing a like perspicacious insight into the characters of her sons, were given by this conscientious lady to the governess she had engaged to assist her in moulding their dispositions. Alice Meakins was the daughter of the rector of Great Charmington, and had the prime recommendation in her employer’s eyes of being her humble slave and completely under her orders. Had she been a little less in awe of Lady Charmington, and less impressed with the enormity of differing from her, she might perhaps have enlightened her on many matters concerning the little boys. Her mild rule, while it galled his more spirited brother, sat very lightly on Sainty, who worshipped the governess as the most talented and accomplished of mortals. ‘But I like her, I’m fond of her; I don’t _want_ to do what she tells me not,’ he pleaded to the indignant Arthur, as usual incensed by his brother’s want of pluck, in refusing to join in some plot against the authority of their instructress. ‘Ho, ho, Miss Moddlecoddle, you can’t ride, you’ve got no seat and no hands; Bell said so. You’re jolly bad at games, and you like to sit and suck up to an old governess, and do needlework with her, like a beastly girl. I’m a man, and I shan’t do what she tells me. What business has she to order me about? she is only a servant like the others.’

Sainty was shocked. ‘O Arthur! you do say _horrid_ things,’ he said. It was true that he did like sitting with the gentle Meakins, and acquiring the modest arts of which she was the mistress. She had many little manual dexterities such as governesses impart to children, whereby the world is filled with innocent horrors, kettleholders in cross-stitch, penwipers faintly resembling old women with cloth cloaks and petticoats, and little black seeds for faces, and book-markers in the shape of crosses with many steps, plaited of strips of gilt and coloured paper. In all these manufactures Sainty soon became proficient. He also illuminated texts, ‘Be thou faithful unto death,’ and ‘The greatest of these is Charity,’ which were presented to Lady Charmington on her birthday. On the subject of the texts and the little plaited crosses Lady Charmington had a word to say to Miss Meakins in private, as being rather too papistical in tendency; but she was not displeased with the simple presents, on the whole, until her anxious maternal eye was led to detect the danger that might lurk in cross-stitch by some petulant remarks of Arthur’s, who wanted Sainty to come out and play Red Indians in the long shrubbery. ‘Muvver,’ he cried, bursting into the boudoir, where his mother was busy with some farm accounts, ‘isn’t Sainty howid? He won’t come out, though he’s done his lessons, ‘cos he will stick in and do beastly woolwork.’ One of Arthur’s many charms was a babyish imperfection of speech. He never could pronounce ‘th’ or ‘r,’ even when quite grown up.

‘What is it he’s doing?’ asked Lady Charmington.

‘Oh, beastly woolwork; he’s got two-fwee fings he’s makin’, and he likes to sit like a girl, instead of coming out and playing.’

A shade of annoyance crossed the mother’s face. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use such words as “beastly,” Arthur,’ she said severely, but the severity was really addressed to the absent first-born and the effeminacy of his tastes; and the schoolroom was presently visited by the mistress of the house, and Sainty duly turned out to distasteful recreation. When he had gone forth to be scalped by the fraternal savage, his mother turned to the instructress. ‘I think, Alice,’ she said, holding up the offending kettleholder, ‘that it is a pity, on the whole, to teach Sainty to work; he’s quite sufficiently effeminate by nature, without having that side of him encouraged. I will speak to him about it. I shall tell him I don’t approve of his working; it’s not manly.’ She was surprised, when she carried out this intention, by meeting with passionate tears and protestations.

‘O mother, I love my work; it’s the only thing I do enjoy, except botany, and reading, and some lessons (not ‘rithmetic or spelling); and I have to do so many things I _don’t_ like, cricket and riding, and--and--all the dreadful things that men and gentlemen have to do,’ the little boy concluded, quoting a formula frequently used for his encouragement.

Though not habitually distrustful of her own judgment, nothing so confirmed Lady Charmington in a view she adopted as any opposition to it; and the kettleholders became taboo from that day forward. Poor Sainty’s confession of dislike for the manlier sports that, as he said, were considered a necessary part of the education of a gentleman, was perhaps the most unfortunate argument he could have chosen, for it naturally convinced his mother that the mischief lay deeper than she supposed, and suggested to her the advisability of transferring the boys from petticoat government altogether; that is, of course, as far as the subordinate powers were concerned. The particular petticoat that typified her own sway remained in undisturbed possession of the throne in all her plans for the future.

‘I think the boys are getting too much for poor Miss Meakins,’ she said to her brother, on his next visit. ‘She is an excellent girl, though a little inclined to be high church; but they ought to be under a man, I feel sure.’

‘Don’t tell me that Sainty is becoming insubordinate?’ said Lord Corstorphine.

‘No; but Arthur hasn’t the smallest respect for her. With Sainty the danger is of a different kind; he is perhaps _too_ fond of women’s society.’

‘Not a precocious passion for the governess! I can’t believe that.’

Lady Charmington looked resigned. ‘I don’t deny, Corstorphine,’ she said, ‘that you have been a great help to me in the management of my fatherless boys; that is why I am consulting you on the present occasion. But it is no help to be flippant and funny. What I mean is that Sainty is quite sufficiently inclined by nature to be a milksop, without living perpetually with women, and adopting their ways. He likes better than any game to sit indoors with Miss Meakins on fine days, and do woolwork.’

‘Have him out, Sarah, by all means,’ returned her brother. ‘I can’t help being a little pleased at his liking reading. A Chambers who occasionally opens a book, and is tolerably well behaved, will be an agreeable variation of the type. But it’s bad his not wanting to be out, and playing games; it isn’t natural.’

Lord Corstorphine felt that he was as near normal as it was possible to be, without becoming commonplace, and that those whose tastes differed widely from his own must always be more or less blamably eccentric. Still his greater commerce with the world had given him a wider toleration than either of his sisters, who had been known to call him a Laodicean, and Sarah once went so far as to draw a parallel between her brother and Gallio. But though she affected to be shocked at the looseness of his views, his known moderation made her lean the more confidently on his judgment. The knowledge that her opinion was backed by one whom the world praised for common-sense, gave a pleasing security that her own noble zeal was not hurrying her into extremes. It was invariably she who initiated every change in the education of her sons. But, though it may be doubted how she would have borne opposition from her fellow-guardian, his agreement was always a comfort to her.

So Alice Meakins, with her little crosses and penwipers, returned to the paternal rectory, with the highest testimonials from her dear Lady Charmington, to look out for another situation.

Poor Sainty could not be comforted. To be sure, no one tried much to comfort him. For the first time he felt a rebellious bitterness towards his mother. Though he could imagine nothing so dashing as active disobedience, he cherished a dark determination to be very cold and reserved towards the new tutor, with the natural result that Miss Meakins’s successor, a youth fresh from Oxford, and also of the children of the clergy, conceived a great liking for Arthur, and favoured him prodigiously.

This young man, who had been selected mainly for his reputation as a cricketer, left Lady Charmington nothing to desire in the matter of sport, and was quite ready to ride any horse in her limited stable; nor need she feel anxiety as to his holding extreme views in religious matters. It is true he attended family prayers with exemplary punctuality, and accompanied his charges to service twice on Sundays; but she could detect no sign of the interest in matters ecclesiastical which she looked for in a son of the Church, and his waistcoats and riding-boots had a decidedly worldly air.

Under Mr. Kirkpatrick, Sainty early proved the cynical dictum that life were endurable but for its pleasures, the hated pastimes, in which his sex and position in life inexorably demanded that he should find enjoyment. He stood like a martyr at the stake, to be bowled at with the Englishman’s fetish, that terrible disc of solid leather which he knew he should not hit, but which not infrequently hit him; and he would unhesitatingly have indorsed Mr. Pinchbold’s remark that ‘the horse was a fearful animal.’ He was so painstaking, however, and anxious to do what was expected of him, that he might possibly have attained in time to some sort of proficiency in these alien arts, had his efforts been greeted with a little more encouragement, and a little less ridicule; but the race is not yet extinct of those who hold that the best way to teach a child to swim is to throw him into the water.

Meanwhile a new terror arose on Sainty’s horizon. When Mr. Kirkpatrick had been at Belchamber eighteen months, he one day intimated to Lady Charmington that he had been offered a mastership in a public school, and could not afford to remain much longer with his pupils. It was therefore suggested that, as they were both presently to go to Eton, a few years at a private school would not be undesirable as a preparation. Even Arthur was a little daunted at the prospect, while rather fascinated by it; but to Sainty it loomed black as the final end of all brightness, closing in the vista of his life and blotting out the sun. It seemed to him that each step in the _via dolorosa_ of his existence was fated to be more awful than the last. When his beloved Miss Meakins had been replaced by the hated Kirkpatrick, he thought to have tasted the dregs of bitterness; but now a new prospect had come to make life in the familiar places that he loved with a catlike fidelity appear the one thing desirable, even shadowed by the tutor and his cricket-ball. I suppose it seemed a hard thing to our first parents when the Serpent was introduced into Eden; but life in Paradise, even with a snake in the garden, was a very different thing from the flaming sword that drove them out into an unknown world of work and briars. Sainty said little to earthly ears, but he prayed nightly with intense fervour that he might die before the day came to go to school, which seemed the only escape to his poor little hunted mind.

But there was another way, which, if he could have foreseen it, would have taxed his courage with a far more genuine fright than that vague abstraction, death, for which we all cry aloud so readily in our youth when things do not go as we wish. Arthur went to school alone when the time arrived, and this was how it came about.

It was a beautiful day at the end of March. Mr. Kirkpatrick was to leave at Easter, and the dreaded exodus was only a month away. It was a late spring, and the snow still lay on the north side of the hedgerows. But it had rained in the night, and there was that indefinable sense of spring in the air that sometimes comes quite suddenly. The primroses were beginning to gem the coppices, the birds to sing late in the long twilights. Daffodils waved in the fields where the young lambs were bleating.

‘What are you and the boys going to do this afternoon, Mr. Kirkpatrick?’ asked Lady Charmington at lunch.

The tutor looked inquiringly at the boys. ‘I’ll do whatever they wish, Lady Charmington. What should you like?’ he asked of Sainty.

‘I should like to go to One-tree Wood, and get primroses,’ Sainty answered, after the usual slight struggle that it always cost him to express a wish or an opinion.

‘Get Gwanmuvvers!’ burst in Arthur. ‘Bovver pwimwoses; you don’t care about ’em, do you, Mr. Kirkpatrick? I want to wide; Bell says the gwound’s in quite good order to-day, after the wain. We’ve hardly widden at all lately, ‘cos it’s been so hard.’

As usual, Arthur had his way, and poor Sainty was condemned to ride. Generally he gained confidence when he had been out a little while, but to-day somehow everything went wrong. He began by rolling off at the hall door, because his stirrups were too long, and the pony moved on unexpectedly while they were being taken up. He was much chaffed for this misadventure by his companions, and he did not like chaff. Then the pony was fresh and inclined to shy, after the inaction of the long frost, so that he had a bad time of it altogether; but he managed to stick on somehow until they were on their way home.

They had been round by Little Charmington, and their way lay through one of the high woods. When they came to the gate that led into the park, they found it locked.

‘I never knew this gate locked before,’ said Kirkpatrick, pulling feebly at it with his whip. ‘I don’t suppose either of you have got the key by any chance?’

‘Jaggins must have locked it. He’s got some young pheasants further up the wood,’ said Arthur; ‘he told me so.’

‘I suppose we must go back,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘but it’s an awful long way round. We shall be late for tea, which your mother doesn’t like, and you’ve got some more work to do afterwards. There’s a gap in the hedge a little way along here,’ he added more hopefully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t jump the ditch? It would save us a good two miles, and it’s really nothing of a jump.’

‘Of course we can jump the ditch. Hurray! what fun!’ cried Arthur, and without more words he wheeled his pony, put him at the gap, and the next moment was careering about on the turf beyond, in a great state of excitement and jubilation.

‘You see, it’s quite easy,’ the tutor said, turning to Sainty, whose pony was already beginning to fidget, excited by the trampling about on snapping twigs and the rush past of the other. Sainty was very white.

‘You know I can’t jump, Mr. Kirkpatrick,’ he said, gulping tears. ‘I’m sure to fall off if I try; I always do.’

‘Not you,’ the young man replied encouragingly. ‘You see your little brother has done it. I should be ashamed to have him ride so much better than me, if I were you.’ The poor man was rather in a fix, with one pupil already across the obstacle and the other resolutely declining to follow.

‘See,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lead. It’s as easy as easy; you’ve only to sit well back, and give him his head,’ And so saying, he put his horse at the gap, and followed Arthur into the park. ‘Come on,’ he called.

‘Jump, Sainty, jump,’ piped Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be such a funk.’

Whether Sainty would ever have found the courage to attempt the jump is doubtful, if the pony at this stage of the proceedings had not decided matters by bolting at the gap. But bothered and bewildered by the tugging of his rider’s despairing hands, he swerved just at the jump, and, slipping on the trodden earth where Kirkpatrick’s horse had taken off, he came to the ground; then struggling to his feet, galloped off through the wood by the road they had come.

The young man was horror-stricken when he saw the accident; he was off his horse, and by the side of the fallen boy in a second. Sainty was unconscious, that was all he could tell.

‘Now, Arthur,’ he cried to the younger boy, who was beginning to tremble and cry, ‘this is the moment to show the stuff you’re made of. I must stay here with Sainty, but you must get home across the park as hard as you can go, so as to tell your mother what’s happened, and save her the shock of seeing Donald come home without his rider. And then send people here to carry Sainty in; he may be more hurt than we think.’

Arthur waited for no more, but galloped off in the direction of the house, glad to have something definite to do, instead of staring at poor Sainty.

Lady Charmington had come home sooner than she expected, and was taking off her hat, when she saw Arthur come galloping across the park alone. She looked with pride at the boy, thinking how well he sat his pony; and she gave a little sigh at the half-formed thought that just crossed her mind, ‘What a pity he wasn’t the elder!’ The next minute her heart stood still; she had caught sight in the far distance of a speck, which as it drew nearer she recognised with sickening terror as Sainty’s pony, riderless, and with his saddle turned under his belly. ‘Not _that_ way, my God! I did not mean _that_.’ Was it possible that God was punishing her for her rebellious thought? could He have thought that she desired the death of her first-born? And she prayed with all the intensity of her soul that whatever had happened her boy might not die. ‘Maimed, crippled, or an idiot, if so it must be; only let him live.’ This was the cry of her heart, again and again repeated, as guided by the child, she stumbled across the park with the men who were to bring him home. Arthur could tell her little, except that Sainty had had a fall and was hurt. Perhaps even then her child was lying dead, while she was wishing in her sinful heart that his brother had his heritage.

But Sainty was not dead, and did not die. The pony had kicked him in its struggles to rise, and he had fainted. There were long nights and days of pain to be borne, and he bore it as nervous people often do, who can stand anything but anticipation.

At first he made sure that the death he had asked for had come to him, and even, one day, when he was a little better, attempted to bring off one of the beautiful scenes with Arthur, which he had so often rehearsed. But somehow it was not a great success. Arthur did not do his part at all nicely. He only said, ‘Oh! bower, dear old Sainty. You ain’t going to die; what’s ve good of jawing?’ and went off to more congenial pursuits.

Though his life was not in danger, Sainty’s injury was a grave one; the hip was broken, and the great London surgeon who was called down, did not conceal from Lady Charmington that the boy would probably always be more or less lame.

On one of his visits, Sainty astonished the great man not a little.

‘Sir John,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell me something. Shall I ever be able to walk and run again?’

The famous surgeon had boys of his own, and his heart smote him at the pathetic question. ‘Yes, my boy, yes,’ he said; ‘certainly to walk. As to running, oh! well, you won’t be very good at running, not for some time; we mustn’t go too fast, not too fast, you know. Walking comes first; we must get you on your legs first.’

‘But I shan’t ever be able to play games, shall I? not like other boys, I mean.’

‘Oh! well, never’s a long word. I can’t say, I’m sure. Not for a long while, I fear. But we never know, we never know----’

‘Well, at any rate, I shan’t be able to ride, shall I?’ persisted the patient.

Poor Sir John hated to extinguish hope; but thus pushed into a corner, he admitted, ‘Oh! well, ride, you know--I don’t know. I doubt if _riding_ would be advisable. My poor little man, if you must know, I’m afraid you mustn’t count on riding again.’

To his surprise, the boy heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. ‘Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,’ he said.