The boys listened eagerly whilst their host pointed out one and another, with now and then an anecdote connected with them.

“Look,” said Roy, delightedly, “there’s a fine soldier.  He is quite young, and yet what a lot of medals! and oh, General Newton, isn’t that the Victoria Cross on his coat?”

“Yes, my boy, he served his country well for such a youngster, he fought in eight battles, and came home without a scratch, though he had many hair-breadth escapes.  In one battle he had two horses shot under him, and he saved the colors on foot, though he was leading a cavalry charge.”

“He was a regular hero!” murmured the admiring boys.

“I don’t think he was,” said the general, drily.  “He had plenty of dash and go, but no moral courage.  He came home after the wars were over, and broke his mother’s heart by becoming a drunkard and a gambler; and he died an early death from drink and dissipation.”

Roy looked very puzzled.

“I thought a brave man must be a good one, and brave and good to the end of his life.”

“A man can face the cannon’s mouth better than a friend’s ridicule,” said General Newton; “the young soldier we were hearing about before dinner had a nobler courage than this poor fellow here.”

Roy said no more, but though he listened and looked, the rest of the time they were in the gallery, his thoughts were with the hero of the Victoria Cross.  He ran back to have one more look at him before they went downstairs, and gazed up at the bold, frank bearing, and the laughing mouth of the soldier, with wistful pity in his brown eyes.

“You served your Queen and country, but I expect you left out God,” he said, in a whisper; then he ran on to overtake the others.

After an early tea the boys were packed up in the trap to come home.

“Drive home as quickly as you can,” said the general to the groom, “for rain is not far off, and it will not do to let Master Fitz Roy get a soaking; he looks as if a breath of wind will blow him away.”

“I do hate people talking about me like that,” Roy confided to Dudley as they set off at a brisk rate; “I might just as well be a girl.  I often wonder I wasn’t born one for all the good that I shall do in the world.”

“That’s all stuff,” said Dudley, indignantly; “you’ll be an awfully strong man I expect when you grow up, you see if you aren’t!”

Roy shook his head, and was unusually silent for some time.  They were driving through the outskirts of a village when down came the rain.  The groom wrapped the boys up as well as he could, and was urging the horse on, when it suddenly shied and came to a standstill.  Looking down, the groom saw a small child seated in the middle of the road, almost miraculously preserved from the horse’s hoofs.

“Well, here’s a go,” he muttered; “where on earth does it come from, we don’t want no delay in such a storm as this!”