“A widow’s son, ma’am,” so he said to my mother, bowing over her hand as he led her in to dinner, in a style to which we were quite unaccustomed; “a widow’s son, ma’am, should find a father in every honest man who can assist him.”

The tide having turned against Snuffy, his friends (of the Driver and Quills type) turned with it.  But they gained nothing, for one morning he got up as early as we had done, and ran away, and I never heard of him again.  And before nightfall the neighbours, who had so long tolerated his wickedness, broke every pane of glass in his windows.

During all this, Lewis Lorraine and his uncle stayed at our house.  The Colonel spent his time between holding indignant investigations, writing indignant letters (which he allowed us to seal with his huge signet), and walking backwards and forwards to the town to buy presents for the little boys.

When Snuffy ran away, and the school was left to itself, Colonel Jervois strode off to the nearest farm, requisitioned a waggon, and having packed the boys into it, bought loaves and milk enough to breakfast them all, and transported the whole twenty-eight to our door.  He left four with my mother, and marched off with the rest.  The Woods took in a large batch, and in the course of the afternoon he had for love or money quartered them all.  He betrayed no nervousness in dealing with numbers, in foraging for supplies, or in asking for what he wanted.  Whilst other people had been doubting whether it might not “create unpleasantness” to interfere in this case and that, the Colonel had fought each boy’s battle, and seen most of them off on their homeward journeys.  He was used to dealing with men, and with emergencies, and it puzzled him when my Uncle Henry consulted his law-books and advised caution, and my father saw his agent on farm business, whilst the fate of one of Crayshaw’s victims yet hung in the balance.

When all was over the Colonel left us, and took Lewis with him, and his departure raised curiously mixed feelings of regret and relief.

He had quite won my mother’s heart, chiefly by his energy and tenderness for the poor boys, and partly by his kindly courtesy and deference towards her.  Indeed all ladies liked him—­all, that is, who knew him.  Before they came under the influence of his pleasantness and politeness, he shared the half-hostile reception to which any person or anything that was foreign to our daily experience was subjected in our neighbourhood.  So that the first time Colonel Jervois appeared in our pew, Mrs. Simpson (the wife of a well-to-do man of business who lived near us) said to my mother after church, “I see you’ve got one of the military with you,” and her tone was more critical than congratulatory.  But when my mother, with unconscious diplomacy, had kept her to luncheon, and the Colonel had handed her to her seat, and had stroked his moustache, and asked in his best manner if she meant to devote her son