’And Roger is always far too full of his natural history and comparative anatomy, and messes of that sort, to be thinking of falling in love with Venus herself, He has not the sentiment and imagination of Osborne.’

’Ah, you don’t know; you never can be sure about a young man!  But with Roger it wouldn’t so much signify.  He would know he couldn’t marry for years to come.’

All that afternoon the squire tried to steer clear of Molly, to whom he felt himself to have been an inhospitable traitor.  But she was so perfectly unconscious of his shyness of her, and so merry and sweet in her behaviour as a welcome guest, never distrusting him for a moment, however gruff he might be, that by the next morning she had completely won him round, and they were quite on the old terms again.  At breakfast this very morning, a letter was passed from the squire to his wife, and back again, without a word as to its contents; but—­

‘Fortunate!’

‘Yes! very!’

Little did Molly apply these expressions to the piece of news Mrs Hamley told her in the course of the day; namely, that her son Osborne had received an invitation to stay with a friend in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and perhaps to make a tour on the Continent with him subsequently; and that, consequently, he would not accompany his brother when Roger came home.

Molly was very sympathetic.

‘Oh, dear!  I am so sorry!’

Mrs. Hamley was thankful her husband was not present, Molly spoke the words so heartily.

’You have been thinking so long of his coming home.  I am afraid it is a great disappointment.’

Mrs. Hamley smiled—­relieved.

’Yes! it is a disappointment certainly, but we must think of Osborne’s pleasure.  And with his poetical mind, he will write us such delightful travelling letters.  Poor fellow!  He must be going into the examination to-day!  Both his father and I feel sure, though, that he will be a high wrangler.’  Only—­I should like to have seen him, my own dear boy.  But it is best as it is.’

Molly was a little puzzled by this speech, but soon put it out of her head.  It was a disappointment to her, too, that she should not see this beautiful, brilliant young man, his mother’s hero.  From time to time her maiden fancy had dwelt upon what he would be like; how the lovely boy of the picture in Mrs. Hamley’s dressing-room would have changed in the ten years that had elapsed since the likeness was taken; if he would read poetry aloud; if he would even read his own poetry.  However, in the never-ending feminine business of the day, she soon forgot her own disappointment; it only came back to her on first wakening the next morning, as a vague something that was not quite so pleasant as she had anticipated, and then was banished as a subject of regret.  Her days at Hamley were well filled up with the small duties that would have belonged to a daughter of the house had there been one.  She made breakfast