“Fitz Roy Bertram.”

   “My dear Rob: 

“I hope you like being a soldier.  How many soldiers are there in the same house with you?  Give them my love and tell them we hope they liked the cake we put in your box for them.  Roy came down to old Principle’s with me yesterday.  He showed us a hammer out of his cave he dug up.  He says you will not be a full blown soldier for a year.  He had a cousin who was a sergeant in India—­and had his brains burst out in battle.  When do you begin to fight?  Tell us if you feel funky, and what the enemy looks like, and who they are.  We think you ought to write us a much jollier letter.  Roy’s leg is first-rate, and he is up on the garden wall now like a cat.  We sit there to do our evening prep:  for old Selby.  Good-bye.  We’re on the lookout for your name in the newspapers the first battle that comes off.

   “Roy’s friend,

   “Dudley.”

“I don’t think you’ve finished your letter properly,” observed Roy, critically, as Dudley concluded reading his.  “Why do you write you’re my friend?”

“Because I am,” was the prompt reply; “I’m not Rob’s friend and I shan’t tell him I am.  I just write to him because you do, that’s all.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“I don’t want him for my friend; he’s going to be a kind of servant.  Besides I wanted him to remember that I was your friend.  I knew you long before he did, and if he was dead now, or if he never had been born, I should have been your friend just the same.  We could have got on all right without him.”

This was not the first touch of jealousy that had appeared in Dudley’s character.  He had more than once quarrelled with Roy on account of the boy who he said had crept in between them, but on Roy always emphatically assuring him that Rob occupied a back place in his affections, Dudley would generally be appeased and become his sunny self again.

“I like Rob very much,” said Roy, slowly, “’specially now he’s a soldier.  I was thinking in church last Sunday, when they were reading about David and Jonathan, that Jonathan had an armor-bearer.  That’s Rob.  Only I can’t go to battle, so I send him.  Don’t you think that’s a nice idea?”

“Did he get killed?” asked Dudley, with interest; “I forget about him.”

“It doesn’t say—­I expect he lived as long as Jonathan did, and then perhaps David took him to be his servant.  That’s what I’ve settled with Rob, that he shall be your servant if I die.”

Dudley gave himself an impatient shake.

“Oh, shut up with that rot, you’ll live as long as I do!”

Roy did not speak for a minute, then he said, slowly, “You remember my will that I made when I was so ill?”

“Yes, what did you do with it?”

“Aunt Judy found it the next morning on the floor nearly under the bed.  She laughed a little at first, and then got quite grave when I explained it, and she took it away and locked it up somewhere.  But if I never make another, you will remember that I have left Rob to you for your servant.”