’Australia!  Why, Osborne, what could you do there?  And leave my father!  I hope you’ll never get your hundred pounds, if that’s the use you’re to make of it!  Why, you’d break the squire’s heart.’

‘It might have done once,’ said Osborne, gloomily, ’but it would not now.  He looks at me askance, and shies away from conversation with me.  Let me alone for noticing and feeling this kind of thing.  It’s this very susceptibility to outward things that gives me what faculty I have; and it seems to me as if my bread, and my wife’s too, were to depend upon it.  You’ll soon see for yourself the terms which I am on with my father!’

Roger did soon see.  His father had slipped into a habit of silence at meal times—­a habit which Osborne, who was troubled and anxious enough for his own part, had not striven to break.  Father and son sate together, and exchanged all the necessary speeches connected with the occasion civilly enough; but it was a relief to them when their intercourse was over, and they separated—­the father to brood over his sorrow and his disappointment, which were real and deep enough, and the injury he had received from his boy, which was exaggerated in his mind by his ignorance of the actual steps Osborne had taken to raise money.  If the money-lenders had calculated the chances of his father’s life or death in making their bargain, Osborne himself had thought only of how soon and how easily he could get the money requisite for clearing him from all imperious claims at Cambridge, and for enabling him to follow Aimee to her home in Alsace, and for the subsequent marriage.  As yet, Roger had never seen his brother’s wife; indeed, he had only been taken into Osborne’s full confidence after all was decided in which his advice could have been useful.  And now, in the enforced separation, Osborne’s whole thought, both the poetical and practical sides of his mind, ran upon the little wife who was passing her lonely days in farmhouse lodgings, wondering when her bridegroom husband would come to her next.  With such an engrossing subject it was, perhaps, no wonder that he unconsciously neglected his father; but it was none the less sad at the time, and to be regretted in its consequences.

‘I may come in and have a pipe with you, sir, mayn’t I?’ said Roger, that first evening, pushing gently against the study-door, which his father held only half open.

‘You’ll not like it,’ said the squire, still holding the door against him, but speaking in a relenting tone.  ’The tobacco I use isn’t what young men like.  Better go and have a cigar with Osborne.’

‘No.  I want to sit with you, and I can stand pretty strong tobacco.’

Roger pushed in, the resistance slowly giving way before him.

’It will make your clothes smell.  You’ll have to borrow Osborne’s scents to sweeten yourself,’ said the squire, grimly, at the same time pushing a short smart amber-mouthed pipe to his son.