“Should you have objected if he had still been going to India?”

“I would have prevented an engagement, and should have regretted her knowing anything about it.  The wear of such waiting might be too great a strain on her.”

“Possibly,” said Fordham.  “And should you consider this other profession an insuperable objection?”

“Certainly not, if he goes on as I think he will; but such success cannot come to him for many years, and a good deal may happen in that time.”

Poor Lucas!  He would have been much cheered could he have heard the above conversation instead of Cecil’s wrath, which, like his sister’s, worked a good deal like madness on the brain.

Mr. Evelyn chose to resent the slight to his family, and the ingratitude to his uncle, in thus running counter to their wishes, and plunging into what the young aristocrat termed low life.  He did not spare the warning that it would be impossible to keep up an intimacy with one who chose to “grub his nose in hospitals and dissecting rooms.”

Naturally Lucas took these as the sentiments of the whole family, and found that he was sacrificing both love and friendship.  Sir James Evelyn indeed allowed that he was acting rightly according to his lights.  Sir Philip Cameron told him that his duty to a widowed mother ought to come first, and his own Colonel, a good and wise man, commended his decision, and said he hoped not to lose sight of him.  The opinions of these veterans, though intrinsically worth more than those of the two young Evelyns, were by no means an equivalent to poor Lucas.  The “great things” he had resolved not to seek, involved what was far dearer.  It was more than he had reckoned on when he made his resolution, but he had committed himself, and there was no drawing back.  He was just of age, and had acted for himself, knowing that his mother would withhold her consent if she were asked for it; but he was considering how to convey the tidings to her, when he found that a card had been left for him by the Reverend David Ogilvie, with a pencilled invitation to dine with him that evening at an hotel.

Mr. Ogilvie, after several years of good service as curate at a district Church at a fashionable south coast watering place, sometimes known as the English Sorrento, had been presented to the parent Church.  He had been taking his summer holiday, and on his way back had undertaken to relieve a London friend of his Sunday services.  His sister’s letters had made him very anxious for tidings of Mrs. Brownlow, and he had accordingly gone in quest of her son.

He ordered dinner with a half humorous respect for the supposed epicurism of a young Guardsman, backed by the desire to be doubly correct because of the fallen fortunes of the family, and he awaited with some curiosity the pupil, best known to him as a pickle.

“Mr. Brownlow.”