‘Yes,’ exclaimed Lucy; ’and, after all, they are such absurd regulations, treating men like schoolboys, wanting them to keep such regular troublesome hours.  Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy told me that there was no enduring the having everything enforced.’

’If things had been enforced on poor Algernon earlier, this might never have been,’ sighed his uncle.

‘I’m sure I don’t see why papa should mind it so much,’ continued Lucy.  ’Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy told me his friend Lord Reginald Raymond had been rusticated twice, and expelled at last.’

‘What do you think of it, Sophy?’ asked the vicar, anxiously.

‘I don’t feel as if any of us could ever look up again,’ she answered very low.

’Why, no; not that exactly.  It is not quite the right way to take these things, Sophy,’ said Mr. Dusautoy.  ’Boys may be very foolish and wrong-headed, without disgracing their family.’

Sophy did not answer—­it was all too fresh and sore, and she did not find much consolation in the number of youths whom Lucy reckoned up as having incurred the like penalty.  When they entered the house, and Mr. Dusautoy knocked at the library door, she followed Lucy into the garden, without knowing where she was going, and threw herself down upon the grass, miserable at the pain which was being inflicted upon her father, and with a hardened resentful feeling, between contempt and anger, against the brother, who, for very weakness, could so dishonour and grieve him.  She clenched her hand in the intensity of her passionate thoughts and impulses, and sat like a statue, while Lucy, from time to time, between the tying up of flowers and watering of annuals, came up with inconsistent exhortations not to be so unhappy—­for it was not expulsion—­it was sure to be unjust—­nobody would think the worse of them because young men were foolish—­all men of spirit did get into scrapes—­

It was lucky for Lucy that all this passed by Sophy’s ear as unheeded as the babbling of the brook.  She did not move, till roused by Ulick O’More, coming up from the bridge, telling that he had met some Irish haymakers in the meadows, and saying he wanted to beg a frock for one of their children.

‘I think I can find you one,’ said Lucy, ’if you will wait a minute; but don’t go in, Mr. Dusautoy is there.’

‘Is anything the matter?’ he exclaimed.

‘Every one must soon know,’ said Lucy; ’it is of no use to keep it back, Sophy.  Only my brother and Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy have got into a scrape about a wine party, and are going to be rusticated.  But wait, I’ll fetch the frock.’

Sophy had almost run away while her sister spoke, but the kind look of consternation and pity on Ulick’s face deterred her, he in soliloquy repeated, as if confounded by the greatness of the misfortune, ‘Poor Gilbert!’

‘Poor Gilbert!’ burst from Sophy in irritation at misplaced sympathy; ‘I thought it would be papa and mamma you cared for!’