“No, certainly not,” said Jock.  Then, with a little hesitation, “In fact, that’s all up.”

“He has not thrown you over?” said his mother; “or is there any difficulty about your exchange?”

Here Babie broke in, “Oh, that’s it!  That’s what Sydney meant!  Oh, Jock! you don’t mean that you let it prey upon you-—the nonsense I talked?  Oh, I will never, never say anything again!”

“What did she say?” demanded Jock.

“Sydney?  Oh, that it would break her heart and Cecil’s if you persisted, and that she could not prevent you, and it was my duty.  Mother, that was the letter I didn’t show you.  I could not understand it, and I thought you had enough to worry you.”

“But what does it all mean?” asked their mother.  “What have you been doing to the Evelyns?”

“Mother, I have gone back to our old programme,” said Jock.  “I have sent in my papers; I said nothing to you, for I thought you would only vex yourself.”

“Oh, Jock!” she said, overpowered; “I should never have let you!”

“No, mother, dear, I knew that, so I didn’t ask you.”

“You undutiful person!” but she held out her arm, and as he came to her, she leant her head against him, sobbing a little sob of infinite relief, as though fortitude found it much pleasanter to have a living column.

“You’ve done it?” said Armine.

“You will see it gazetted in a day or two.”

“Then it is all over,” cried Babie, again in tears; “all our dreams of honour, and knighthood, and wounds, and glorious things!”

“You can always have the satisfaction of believing I should have got them,” said Jock, but there was a quiver in his voice, and a thrill through his whole frame that showed his mother that it was very sore with him, and she hastened to let him subside into a chair while she asked if it was far to the end of the canto, and as Babie was past reading, she took the book and finished it herself.  Nobody had much notion of the sense, but the cadence was soothing, and all were composed by the time the prayer-bell rang.

“Come to my dressing-room presently,” she said to Lucas, as he lighted her candle for her.

Just as she had gone up stairs, the front door opened to admit Bobus.

“Oh, you are here!” was his salutation.  “So you have done for yourself?”

“How do you know?”

“Your colonel wrote to my uncle.  He was at the dinner, and made me come back with him to ask if I knew about it.”

“How does he take it?”

“He will probably fall on you, as he did on me to-night, calling it all my fault.”

“As how?”

“For looking out for myself.  For my part, I had thought it praiseworthy, but he says none of the rest of us care a rush for my mother, and so the only one of us good for anything has to be the victim.  But don’t plume yourself.  You’ll be the scum of the earth when he has you before him.  Poor old boy, it is a sore business to him, and it doesn’t improve his temper.  I believe this place is a greater loss to him than to my mother.  What are your plans?”