the spray of the Channel, which sprinkling one’s cheeks, caused one to roar with laughter, till more moderation was enjoined; the incessant throb of the engines; the vision of white cliffs, and the excitement among the passengers; the headache; the landing on a black old pier; the privilege of guarding the luggage by sitting upon as much of one trunk as six years’ growth of boy will cover, and pressing firmly upon two other trunks with either hand, while Mrs. Ray (that capable lady) changed francs into shillings; there was the wearisome and rolling train-journey, wherein one slept, first against the window and then against the black sleeve of an unknown gentleman; and lastly there was the realisation that pale and sunny France had withdrawn into the past to make room for pale and smutty London.

Now the Captain of all these manoeuvres, as the meanest intelligence will have observed, was Mrs. Ray.  Mrs. Ray was Rupert’s mother, and as beautiful as every mother must be, who has an only son, and is a widow.  Moreover she was a perfect teller of stories:  all really beautiful mothers are.  And, for years after, she used at evening time to draw young Rupert against her knees, and tell him the traditional stories of that old half-pay officer at Boulogne.  And grandfather was indeed a hero in these stories.  We suspect—­but who can sound the artful depths of a woman who is at once young, lovely, a mother, and a widow?—­that Mrs. Ray, knowing that Rupert could never recall his father, was determined that at least one soldierly figure should loom heroic in his childish memories.  She would tell again and again how he asked repeatedly, as he lay dying, for “that Rupert, the best of the lot.”  And her son would say:  “I s’pose he meant Daddy, mother.”  “Yes,” she would answer.  “You see, you were all Ruperts:  Grandfather Rupert Ray, Daddy Rupert Ray, and Sonny Rupert Ray, my own little Sonny Ray.” (Mothers talk in this absurd fashion, and Mrs. Ray was the chief of such offenders.)

But quite the masterpiece of all her tales was this.  One summer morning, when the Boulogue promenade was bright and crowded and lively, the Colonel was seated with his grandson beside him.  A little distance away sat Rupert’s mother, who was just about as shy of the Colonel as the Colonel was shy of her (which fact accounts, probably, for Rupert Ray’s growing up into the shy boy we knew).  Well, all of a sudden, the boy got up, stood immediately in front of his grandsire, and leaned forward against his knees.  There was no mistaking the meaning in the child’s eyes; they said plainly:  “This is entirely the best attitude for story-telling, so please.”

The officer, with military quickness, summed up the perilous situation on his front; he had suffered himself to be bombarded by a pair of patient eyes.  And now he must either acknowledge his incompetence by a shameful retreat, or he must stir up the dump of his imagination and see what stories it contained.  So with no small apprehension, he drew upon his inventive genius.