You see, Rupert had been told off one shooting day to look after a young lawyer and give him some sport, because his Lordship wanted to please the young man’s father, who was his own man of business.  This chap took to Rupert, by reason of his queer nature, and when they was eating their sandwiches, he must needs talk and chaff my son.  He told Rupert about a will as he’d drawed back along for the Dowager, and how an old butler at Tudor Manor was down for five hundred, and the cook for two hundred, and a lady’s maid, as served her before she took to her bed and had two nurses, was down for five hundred.  But the lawyer named no names and didn’t know that Rupert knew who that lady’s maid was.  And in any case the rash youth never ought to have opened his mouth, of course, on such a secret subject.

But twenty-four hours later, my ‘Mother’s Misfortune’ was tokened to Minnie Parable, and when the Dowager died, of course the money came Rupert’s way.

Strange to relate, it was a tolerable happy marriage as such things go.  They bore with one another pretty fair, and though you couldn’t say it was a homely pattern of home, and struck shivers into most folk as saw it, it suited them.  She never put no poison in Rupert’s tea, and he never cut her throat nor nothing like that.  One child they had and no more; and he’ll get his grandfather’s little lot when I don’t want it, and John’ll get mine.

Rupert’s child weren’t one for a Christmas card exactly; but they set a lot of store by him.  Minnie saw through it, of course, when the Dowager died; but she’d got Rupert which was what mattered to her, and she knew the money was bound to goody all right in her husband’s hands; which it did do.

No.  VII

STEADFAST SAMUEL

Samuel Borlase was one of them rare childer who see his calling fixed in his little mind from cradlehood.  We all know that small boys have big ideas and that they fasten on the business of grown-up people and decide, each according to his fancy, how he be going to help the world’s work come he grows up.  This child hopes to be a chimney-sweep, and this longs to be a railway-porter; scores trust to follow the sea and dozens wish for to be a soldier, or a ’bus-conductor, a gardener, or a road-cleaner, as the ambition takes ’em.  My own grandson much desired to clean the roads, because, as he pointed out, the men ordained for that job do little but play about and smoke and spit and watch the traffic and pass the time of day with one another.  He also learned that they got three pounds a week of public money for their fun, and half-holidays of a Saturday, so to his youthful mind it seemed a likely calling.

But most often the ambitions of the human boys be like to change if their parents get much luck in the world, so when you see a steadfast creature, like Samuel Borlase, answer the call in his heart almost so soon as he can walk and talk, you feel the rare event worth setting down.