can one ever be certain what is going to happen?  All was well at home.  I knew exactly (I thought) what they would have to say to me:  “The weather has been so fine, that Roland has not once gone by train, and he enjoys the ride beyond anything.”  “Dear papa, be sure that you don’t forget anything, but bring us so-and-so, and so-and-so,”—­a list as long as my arm.  Dear girls and dearer mother!  I would not for the world have forgotten their commissions, or lost their little letters, for all the Benbows and Crosses in the world.

But I was confident in my home-comfort and peacefulness.  When I got back to my club, however, three or four letters were lying for one, upon some of which I noticed the “immediate,” “urgent,” which old-fashioned people and anxious people still believe will influence the post-office and quicken the speed of the mails.  I was about to open one of these, when the club porter brought me two telegrams, one of which, he said, had arrived the night before.  I opened, as was to be expected, the last first, and this was what I read:  “Why don’t you come or answer?  For God’s sake, come.  He is much worse.”  This was a thunderbolt to fall upon a man’s head who had one only son, and lie the light of his eyes!  The other telegram, which I opened with hands trembling so much that I lost time by my haste, was to much the same purport:  “No better; doctor afraid of brain-fever.  Calls for you day and night.  Let nothing detain you.”  The first thing I did was to look up the time-tables to see if there was any way of getting off sooner than by the night-train, though I knew well enough there was not; and then I read the letters, which furnished, alas! too clearly, all the details.  They told me that the boy had been pale for some time, with a scared look.  His mother had noticed it before I left home, but would not say anything to alarm me.  This look had increased day by day:  and soon it was observed that Roland came home at a wild gallop through the park, his pony panting and in foam, himself “as white as a sheet,” but with the perspiration streaming from his forehead.  For a long time he had resisted all questioning, but at length had developed such strange changes of mood, showing a reluctance to go to school, a desire to be fetched in the carriage at night,—­which was a ridiculous piece of luxury,—­an unwillingness to go out into the grounds, and nervous start at every sound, that his mother had insisted upon an explanation.  When the boy—­our boy Roland, who had never known what fear was—­began to talk to her of voices he had heard in the park, and shadows that had appeared to him among the ruins, my wife promptly put him to bed and sent for Dr. Simson, which, of course, was the only thing to do.