Wayfaring Men. Lyall Edna

brain of the high-minded and scrupulously honourable father, who somehow seemed to him more of a living reality as he spoke than the angry, self-important patron confronting him.

      “He was at least an honest man!” The words had intended no reflection on Sir Matthew, but they had gone straight to the company promoter’s one vulnerable spot, and for the moment had sharply pained him. Incensed at the perception that this fellow might hurt his jealously guarded reputation,—that reputation for benevolence which was part of his stock-in-trade, he had burst forth into angry denunciation, and in one indignant sentence had severed all connection between them.

      He took out a memorandum book now, and made an entry in it with much deliberation, then sat for some time wrapped in thought, gnawing absently at his pencil case, a trick which he had acquired, and of which the dinted surface of the silver bore tokens.

      “One may trust a Denmead to be honourable,” he reflected with a curious sense of satisfaction. “The boy will never mention that little private arrangement as to Crosbie’s retiring in four years. I have bought the living and now the question is how can I use it best to further my own ends? After all, it’s just as well that this fool has refused it. I can use it as a bait for some one else, and I’m quit of Ralph for ever. Though the boy is so like his father in face there’s much more go in him than there ever was in poor Denmead. He has a bit of the sturdy pluck and energy of his little Welsh mother. Pshaw! I needn’t trouble about him. He’s the sort that will swim and not sink, and a little course of starvation will bring him down from his impossible heights and teach him that he must do as other men do.”

      With that he rose and left the library in search of his wife, and having chatted pleasantly enough with her at afternoon tea, he casually alluded to Ralph’s departure.

      “What!” said Lady Mactavish, “Is he going out to India, do you mean.”

      “Not that I know of,” said Sir Matthew with a laugh. “He has failed ignominiously in his examination, and has been most insufferably impertinent to me. I have given him his congé, and he will trouble us no more.”

      “The ungrateful boy!” said Lady Mactavish indignantly, “after all that you have done for him too.”

      “He has behaved very badly,” said Sir Matthew; “and I think, my dear, we are well quit of him. I shall not see him again, but you had better just say good-bye to him, and by-the-by, I think you might give him a couple of five-pound notes; I should be sorry to launch him into the world without a penny in his pockets. It might make people think that I had been harsh with him.” Ralph had gone straight up to the schoolroom in search of Evereld, but something had delayed her and he found the place deserted. Throwing himself down on the window-seat, he let the soft west wind cool his flushed face and tried to think calmly over the interview with Sir Matthew. The attack on his father had angered him as nothing else could have done, and it was over this rather than over his own future that he mused. The sound of Evereld’s voice singing in the passage roused him, but before she had reached the schoolroom, the red baize door leading from the other part of the house creaked on its hinges, and Lady Mactavish appeared upon the scene.

      “I was looking for you, Ralph,” she said, entering the room in front of Evereld. “I learn, to my great annoyance, that you have failed in your examination, failed ignominiously. It is quite clear to us all that you have not been working properly.”

      “But every one says that the Indian Civil is such a dreadfully stiff exam,” said Evereld, “and he did work very hard in Germany; they all said so.”

      “Don’t interrupt me, my dear,” said Lady Mactavish. “It is not a matter you can understand. After all that Sir Matthew has done for you. Ralph, I think at least you might have behaved properly to him. He tells me that you were so impertinent that he has been forced to order you out of the house.”

      “I had no intention of being rude,” said Ralph, standing before her with much the same expression of impatience, curbed by a sense of obligation with which he had always taken her fault-finding.

      “I am quite aware that your intentions are always, according to your own account, immaculate,” she said scathingly, “but, unfortunately, your words and actions don’t correspond with them. You have behaved abominably to the man who has fed, and clothed, and housed you all these years, a man who has wasted hundreds of pounds on your schooling.”

      “Believe me, I do not forget what he has done for me,” said Ralph eagerly. “I am grateful for it. But he used words of my father which were cruel, words which no son could patiently have listened to.”

      “Nothing can excuse the way you have behaved,” said Lady Mactavish, “so say no more about it. What are your plans?”

      “I have made none,” said Ralph, “except to go by the six o’clock train.”

      “Where are you going?”

      “To London,” he replied.

      Lady Mactavish glanced at him a little uneasily. She could not without prickings of conscience think of turning this boy adrift.

      “Sir Matthew, with his usual kindness and generosity, asked me to give you these,” she said, holding out the bank notes. “Though you have so much disappointed and pained him, he will not let you be sent away without money.”

      But Ralph drew back; there was a look in his eyes which half frightened Evereld.

      “Thank you,” he said, “but I cannot take them; after what passed just now in the library it is out of the question.”

      Lady Mactavish looked uncomfortable. “You have been so shielded and cared for that you don’t realise what the world is. You will certainly be getting into trouble. I desire you to take these.”

      “I am sorry to refuse you anything,” he said with studied politeness. “But you ask what is impossible.”

      “Your pride is perfectly ridiculous,” she said, turning away with a look of annoyance. “However, I shall retain these notes for you, and when you have realised your foolishness, you can write and ask me for them.”

      Something in her tone, touched Ralph. It seemed to him that perhaps after all she had taken some little thought for his well-being, and that behind her grumbling, ungracious manner, there was more real heart than he had dreamed.

      “Will you not let me say good-bye to you?” he said. “You must not think I am ungrateful for the home you have given me all these years.”

      She took leave of him more kindly than he had expected, after which he turned thoughtfully back into the schoolroom, where he found poor Evereld sobbing her heart out.

      “Oh, don’t cry,” he said as if the sight of her tears had added the last straw to his burden. “It can’t be helped, Evereld, and after all, had I got through my exam. I should have been going abroad before so very long. And you are going to school for a year. There will be no end of friends for you there.”

      “They won’t be like you,” sobbed Evereld, “You are just like my brother now. Oh, how I wish we were really brother and sister, then they couldn’t turn you out like this.”

      “I wish we were,” said Ralph with a sigh, as he realised how utterly he had now cut himself off from intercourse with her.

      “All we can do, I suppose, is to hear of each other through the Professor and Frau Rosenwald. They will never let me write to you at school. It’s not as if I were your brother really or even your cousin. They’re awfully strict at schools about that.”

      “Well,” said Evereld, resolutely drying her eyes, “We can write in the holidays, and in a little more than three years’ time I can do just exactly what I like. Promise, Ralph, that you will come to me when I am one and twenty. Promise me faithfully.”

      “I promise,” he said. But as he spoke it seemed to him that by that time a thousand things might have happened to divide them. He had a perception somehow that, once broken,