“Don’t turn!” called Armine.  “We must take this,” showing a parcel which he had been sheltering more carefully than himself or his sister.  “It is cord and tassels for the banner.  They sent wrong ones,” said Barbara, “and we had to go and match it.  They would not let me go alone.”

“Get in, I say,” cried Jock, who was making demonstrations with the “national weapon” much as if he would have liked to lay it about their shoulders.

“Then we must drive onto the Parsonage,” stipulated Armine.

“Not a bit of it, you drenched and foolish morsel of humanity.  You are going straight home to bed.  Hand us the parcel.  What will you give me not to tie this cord round the Reverend Petronella’s neck?”

“Thank you, Jock, I’m so glad,” said Babie, referring probably to the earlier part of his speech.  “We would have come home for the pony carriage, but we thought it would be out.”

“Take care of the drip,” was Armine’s parting cry, as Babie turned the pony’s head, and Jock strode down the lane.  He meant merely to have given in the parcel at the door, but Miss Parsons darted out, and not distinguishing him in the dark began, “Thank you, dear Armine; I’m so sorry, but it is in the good cause and you won’t regret it.  Where’s your sister?  Gone home?  But you’ll come and have a cup of tea and stay to evensong?”

“My brother and sister are gone home, thank you,” said Jock, with impressive formality, and a manly voice that made her start.

“Oh, indeed.  Thank you, Mr. Brownlow.  I was so sorry to let them go; but it had not begun to rain, and it is such a joy to dear Armine to be employed in the service.”

“Yes, he is mad enough to run any risk,” said Jock.

“Oh, Mr. Brownlow, if I could only persuade you to enter into the joy of self-devotion, you would see that I could not forbid him!  Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, no.  Good night.”  And Miss Parsons was left rejoicing at having said a few words of reproof to that cynical Mr. Robert Brownlow, while Jock tramped away, grinning a sardonic smile at the lady’s notions of the joys of self-sacrifice.

He came home only just in time for dinner, and found Armine enduring, with a touching resignation learnt in Miss Parsons’s school, the sarcasm of Bobus for having omitted to prepare his studies.  The boy could neither eat nor entirely conceal the chills that were running over him; and though he tried to silence his brother’s objurgations by bringing out his books afterwards, his cheeks burnt, he emitted little grunting coughs, and at last his head went down on the lexicon, and his breath came quick and short.

The Harvest Festival day was perforce kept by him in bed, blistered and watched from hour to hour to arrest the autumn cold, which was the one thing dreaded as imperilling him in the English winter which he must face for the first time for four years.