BOY

Publisher’s Note.

This NEW LONG STORY is the most important volume by MARIE CORELLI published for some years, and the first issued since the Author’s serious illness.
May 31, 1900.

BOY

A SKETCH
By MARIE
CORELLI

London . .
HUTCHINSON & CO
Paternoster Row 1900

PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

To
MY DEAREST FRIEND IN THE WORLD
BERTHA VYVER
WHO HAS KNOWN ALL MY LIFE FROM CHILDHOOD
AND HAS BEEN THE WITNESS OF ALL MY
LITERARY WORK FROM ITS
VERY BEGINNING
THIS SIMPLE STORY
IS
GRATEFULLY AND LOVINGLY DEDICATED

BOY

CHAPTER I

It is said by many people who are supposed to “know things,” that our life is frequently, if not always, influenced by the first impressions we ourselves receive of its value or worthlessness. Some folks, presuming to be wiser even than the wisest, go so far as to affirm that if you, while still an infant in long clothes, happen to take a disgust at the manner and customs of your parents, you will inevitably be disgusted at most events and persons throughout the remainder of your earthly pilgrimage. If any truth exists in such a statement, then “Boy” had excellent cause to be profoundly disappointed in his prospects at a very early outset of his career. He sat in what is sometimes called a “feeding-chair,” wedged in by a bar which guarded him from falling forward or tumbling out upon the floor, and the said bar was provided with an ingenious piece of wood, which was partially hollowed out in such wise as to keep him firm by his fat waist, as well as to provide a resting-place for the plateful of bread-and-milk which he was enjoying as much as circumstances would permit him to enjoy anything. Every now and then he beat the plate solemnly with his spoon, as though improvising a barbaric melody on a new sort of tom-tom,—and lifting a pair of large, angelic blue eyes upwards, till their limpid light seemed to meet and mix with the gold-glint of his tangled curls, he murmured pathetically,—

“Oh, Poo Sing! Does ’oo feels ill? Does ’oo feels bad? Oh, Poo Sing!”

Now, “Poo Sing” was not a Japanese toy, or a doll, or a bird, or any innocent object of a kind to attract a child’s fancy; “Poo Sing” was nothing but a Man, and a disreputable creature even at that “Poo Sing” was Boy’s father, and “Poo Sing” was for the moment—to put it quite mildly—blind drunk. “Poo Sing” had taken his coat and waistcoat off, and had pulled out the ends of his shirt in a graceful white festoon all round the waistband of his trousers. “Poo Sing” had also apparently done some hard combing to his hair, for the bulk of it stood somewhat up on end, and a few grizzled and wiry locks strayed in disorderly fashion across his inflamed nose and puffy eyelids, this effect emphasising the already half-foolish, half-infuriated expression of his face. “Poo Sing” staggered to and fro, his heavy body scarcely seeming to belong to his uncertain legs, and between sundry attacks of hiccough, he trolled out scraps of song, now high, now low, sometimes in a quavering falsetto, sometimes in a threatening bass; while Boy listened to him wonderingly, and regarded his divers antics over the bar of the “feeding-chair” with serious compassion,—the dulcet murmur of, “Does ’oo feels bad? Poo Sing!” recurring at intervals between mouthfuls of bread-and-milk and the rhythmic beat of the spoon. They were a strangely assorted couple,—Boy and “Poo Sing,” albeit they were father and son. Boy, with his fair round visage and bright halo of hair, looked more like a child-angel than a mortal,—and “Poo Sing,” in his then condition, resembled no known beast upon earth, since no beast ever gets voluntarily drunk, save Man. Yet it must not for a moment be imagined that “Poo Sing” was not a gentleman. He was a gentleman,—most distinctly,—most emphatically. He would have told you so himself, had you presumed to doubt it, with any amount of oaths to press home the fact. He would have spluttered at you somewhat in the following terms:—

“My father was a gentleman,—and my grandfather was a gentleman—and my great-grandfather was a gentleman—and d——n you, sir, our people were all gentlemen, every sanguinary man-jack of them, back to the twelfth century! No tommy-rot with me! None of your mean, skulking, money-grubbing Yankee millionaires in our lot! Why, you d——d rascal! Call me a gentleman!—I should pretty much think so! I am a D’Arcy-Muir,—and I have the blood of kings in my veins—d——n you!”

Gentleman! Of course he was a gentleman! His language proved it. And his language was the first lesson in English Boy received, though he was not aware of its full significance. So that when two or three years later on Boy cried out “D——n rascal papa!” quite suddenly and vociferously, he had no consciousness of saying anything that was not the height of filial tenderness and politeness. To be a D’Arcy-Muir, meant to be the descendant of a long line of knights and noblemen who had once upon a time possessed huge castles with deep dungeons, where serfs and close kindred could be conveniently imprisoned and murdered at leisure without distinction as to character or quality;—knights and noblemen who some generations onward were transformed into “six-bottle-men” who thought it seemly to roll under their dining-tables dead drunk every evening, and who, having merged themselves and their “blue blood” into this present nineteenth-century Captain the Honourable James D’Arcy-Muir, the father of Boy,—were, we must suppose, in their condition of departed spirits, perfectly satisfied that they had bestowed a blessing upon the world by the careful production of such a “gentleman” and Christian.

Captain the Honourable, mindful of his race and breeding, took care to marry a lady,—whose ancestry was only just in a slight degree lower than his own. She could not trace her lineage back to the twelfth century, still she came of what is sometimes called a good old stock, and she was handsome enough as a girl, though always large, lazy and unintelligent. Indolence was her chief characteristic;—she hated any sort of trouble. She only washed herself under protest, as a sort of concession to the civilisation of the day. She had been gifted with an abundance of beautiful hair, of a somewhat coarse texture, yet rich in colour and naturally curly,—it was “a nuisance,” she averred,—and as soon as she married, she cut it short “to save the bother of doing it in the morning” as she herself stated. Until she had secured a husband, she had complied sufficiently with the rules of society to keep herself tidily dressed;—but both before and after her boy was born, she easily relapsed into the slovenly condition which she considered “comfort,” and which was her habitual nature. Truth to tell, she had no incentive or ambition to appear at her best. She had not been married to Captain the Honourable D’Arcy-Muir one week before she discovered his partiality for strong drink, and being far too lymphatic to urge resistance, she sank into a state of passive resignation to circumstances. What was the good of a pretty “toilette”? Her husband never noticed how she dressed,—whether she wore satin or sackcloth was a matter of equal indifference to him,—so, finding that a short skirt and loose-fitting blouse formed a comfortable sort of “get-about” costume, she adopted it, and stuck to it morning, noon, and night. Always inclined to embonpoint, she managed to get extremely stout in a very short time; and chancing to read in a journal an article on “hygiene,” which eloquently proved that corsets were harmful and really dangerous to health, she decided to do without them. So that by the time Boy was four years old, Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, in her continual study of personal ease, had developed a loose, floppy sort of figure, which the easy fitting blouse covered, but did not disguise;—to save all possibility of corns she encased her somewhat large feet in soft felt slippers,—swept the short hair from off her brows, did without collars and cuffs, and “managed” her small house in Hereford Square in her own fashion, which “managing” meant having everything at sixes and sevens,—meals served at all hours,—and a general preparation for the gradual destruction of Boy’s digestion by giving him his bread-and-milk and other nourishment at moments when he least expected it.

Thus, it may be conceded by those who know anything about married life and housekeeping, that Boy began his career among curious surroundings. From his “feeding-chair” he saw strange sights,—sights which often puzzled him, and caused him to beat monotonous time on his plate with his baton-spoon in order to distract his little brain. Two large looming figures occupied his horizon—“Muzzy” and “Poo Sing.” “Muzzy” was the easy-going stout lady with the felt slippers, who gave him his bread-and-milk and said he was her boy,—“Poo Sing” was, in the few tranquil moments of his existence, understood to be “Dads” or “Papa.” Boy somehow could never call him either “Dads” or “Papa” when he was seized by his staggering fits; such terms were not sufficiently compassionate for an unfortunate gentleman who was subject to a malady which would not allow him to keep steady on his feet without clutching at the sideboard or the mantelpiece. Boy had been told by “Muzzy” that when “Papa” rolled about the room he was “very ill,”—and the most eloquent language could not fittingly describe the innocent and tender emotions of pity in Boy’s mind when he beheld the progenitor of his being thus cruelly afflicted! Were it possible to touch a drunkard’s heart in the mid career of his drunkenness, then the gentle murmur of “Poo Sing!” from the fresh rosy lips of a little child, and that child his own son, might have moved to a sense of uneasy shame and remorse the particularly tough and fibrous nature of Captain the Honourable D’Arcy-Muir. But Captain the Honourable was of that ancient and noble birth which may be seen asserting itself in rowdy theatre-parties at restaurants in Piccadilly,—and he, with the rest of his distinguished set, said openly “D——n sentiment!” As for any sacredness in the life of a child, or any idea of grave responsibility resting upon him as a father, for that child’s future, such primitive notions never occurred to him. Sometimes when Boy stared at him very persistently with solemnly enquiring grave blue eyes, he would become suddenly and violently irritated, and would demand, “What is the little beggar staring at? Looks like a d——d idiot!”

Then pouring more whisky out of the ever-present bottle into the ever-present glass, he would yell to his wife, “See here, old woman! This child is going to be an infernal idiot! A regular water-on-the-brain, knock-down idiot! Staring at me for all the world as if I were a gorilla! He’s over-fed,—that’s what’s the matter! Guzzling on bread-and-milk till he can’t get a drop more down. Never saw such a d——d little pig in all my d——d life!”

Thus would this gentleman of irreproachable descent bawl forth, the while Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, provokingly passive, irritatingly flabby, and indolently inert, preserved a discreet silence. Such behaviour on her husband’s part was of daily occurrence,—“She knew James’s little ways,” she would remark to any sympathising friends who chanced to discourse with her on the delicate and honeyed bliss of her matrimonial life. “Why did you marry him?” was the question often asked of her, whereat she would answer betwixt a sigh and a yawn,—“Really I don’t know! He seemed quite as decent as most men, and he belongs to a splendid family!” “Did you ever love him?” was another query once put to her by a daring interlocutor inclined rather to romance than reality. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir looked politely surprised.

“Love! Oh, I don’t think that had very much to do with it,” she said. “One doesn’t think about love after one is fifteen or sixteen. That’s all goosey-goosey-gander, you know!”

And a placid smile of superior wisdom lit up her fat face as she thus clinched the would-be heart-searching enquiries of the mere sentimentalist. Because, after all, as she argued, if Jim would get drunk it was no use attempting to thwart him,—he was master of himself and of his own actions. When, after a good heavy bout of it, he was laid up in bed with a galloping pulse, throbbing veins, parched tongue, and a half-crazed brain, that also was no business of hers. She had made no attempt to either restrain or guide him, because she knew it was no use trying to do either. If he did not drink in the house, he would drink outside the house;—if he did not drink openly, he would drink on the sly,—few men ever took a woman’s advice for their good, though they would take all women’s recommendations to the bad. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir was perfectly aware of this peculiar code of man’s morals, as also of the strange limitations of man’s logic, and knowing these things was content to make herself as bodily comfortable as she could, and let other matters go as an untoward fate ordained. Thus it happened that it was only Boy who really thought at all seriously concerning the puzzle of existence. Boy, whose proper Christian name was Robert, seemed nearly always preoccupied about something or other. Judging by the generally wistful expression of his small features, it might be presumed that he had memories. Probably most children have, though they are incapable of expressing them. The enormous gulf of difference between the very young and their elders, exists not only on account of the disparity in years,—but also because the elders have retained, for the most part, nothing more on their minds than the quickly crowding and vanishing impressions of this present world,—while the children are, we may imagine, busy with vague recollections of something better than the immediate condition of things,—recollections which occasionally move them to wonder why their surroundings have become so suddenly and strangely altered. It is impossible not to see, in the eyes of many of these little human creatures, a look of infinite perplexity, sorrow and enquiry,—a look which gradually fades away as they grow older and more accustomed to the ordinary commonplace business of natural existence, while the delicate and dim memories of the Soul in a former state wax faint and indistinct, never to recur again, perhaps, till death re-flashes them on the interior sight with the repeated and everlasting assurance that “here is not our rest.” Boy had thoughts of the past, though none of the future;—he was quite sure that all was not formerly as it appeared to him now,—that there was a time, set far away among rainbow eternities, when “Muzzy” and “Poo Sing” were non est,—when indeed “Muzzy” and “Poo Sing” would have seemed the wildest incoherences and maddest impossibilities. How it had chanced that the rainbow eternities had dispersed for awhile,—had rolled back as it were into space, and had allowed the strange spectacle of “Muzzy” and “Poo Sing” to intervene, was more than Boy could explain, consciously or unconsciously. But he was certain he had not always known these two now apparently necessary personages,—and he was equally certain he had known some sort of beings infinitely more interesting than they could ever be. Fully impressed by this inward conviction, he often dwelt upon it in his own mind,—and this it was that gave him the lovely far-away look in his dreamy blue eyes,—the tender little quivering smile on his rosy mouth, and the whole serene and wise expression of his fair and chubby countenance. Scarcely four years old as he was, it was evident that he had the intuition of some truer life than those around him dreamed of,—the halo of divine things was still about him,—the “God’s image” was just freshly stamped on the bright new coin of his being,—and it remained for the coming years to witness how long the brightness would last in the hands of the untrustworthy individuals who had it in possession. For it is a dangerous fallacy to aver that every man has the making of his destiny in his own hands: to a certain extent he has, no doubt, and with education and firm resolve, he can do much to keep down the Beast and develop the Angel,—but a terrific responsibility rests upon those often voluntarily reckless beings, his parents, who, without taking thought, use the God’s privilege of giving life, while utterly failing to perceive the means offered to them for developing and preserving that life under the wisest and most harmonious conditions. It is certainly true that many parents do what they call their “best” for their children,—that is, they work for them, and educate them, and “place” them advantageously, as they think, in life,—but they are apt to forget that this “life” they set store by, is not only a question of food, clothing, money, and position,—its central pivot is Thought,—and thought begins with the first brain-pulsations. There is no use or sense in denying the fact,—it is so. Therefore the progenitors of those living thought-cells cannot possibly shirk the moral obligation which they take upon themselves from the very moment of a child’s birth. “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children” is often quoted as a merciless axiom,—but it is merely the declaration of a natural law, which, if broken, brings punishment in its train.

Boy, lately arrived from the Infinite, was guiltless of his present dubious surroundings. He did not make his “honourable” father a drunkard, or his mother a sloven. He came into the world designed, perchance, to be the redemption of both his parents, had they received his innocent presence in that spirit. But they did not. They accepted him as a natural result of marriage, and took no more heed of him than a pair of monkeys casually observant of their first offspring. They, by virtue of the evolution theory, should, as human beings, have been on a scale higher than the Simian ancestor,—but Captain D’Arcy-Muir was not even on a par with that hairy personage, inasmuch as the bygone aboriginal monkey, not being aware of strong drink, could not degrade himself that way. As long as Boy was fed, clothed, taken out, and put to bed regularly, “Muzzy” and “Poo Sing” considered they were doing all their necessary duty by him. “Muzzy” would indeed have been profoundly astonished if she had known that Boy took her clothing into his consideration, and wondered why hooks were often off, and buttons often gone from her garments, and why her hair was so like some of the stuffing of the old arm-chair,—woolly sort of stuffing, which was coming through the leather for want of mending. Boy used to compare “Muzzy” with another lady who sometimes came to visit him,—Miss Letitia Leslie,—a wonderful vision to Boy’s admiring eyes,—a rustling, glistening dream, made up of soft dove-coloured silk and violet-scented old lace, and tender, calm blue eyes, and small hands with big diamonds flashing on their dainty whiteness,—“Miss Letty,” as she was generally called, and “that purse-proud old maid,” as Captain the Honourable frequently designated her. Boy had his own title for her,—it was “Kiss-Letty,” instead of “Miss Letty,”—and he would often ask, in dull moments when the numerous perplexities of his small mind became too entangled for him to bear—“Where is Kiss-Letty? Me wants Kiss-Letty! Kiss-Letty loves Boy,—Boy loves Kiss-Letty!”

And to hear him sweetly meandering along in this fashion, the uninitiated stranger might have imagined “Kiss-Letty” to be a kind of fairy,—an elf, born of moonlight and lilies, rather than what she really was, a spinster of forty-five, who made no pretences to be a whit younger than she was,—a spinster who was perfectly content to wear her own beautiful grey hair, and to wish for no “touching up” on the delicate worn pallor of her cheeks—a spinster, moreover, who was proud of her spinsterhood, as it was the sign of her unbroken fidelity to a dead man who had loved her. Miss Letitia Leslie had had her history, her own private tragedy of tears and heart-break; but the depths of sorrow in her soul had turned to sweetness instead of sourness,—her own grief had taught her to be compassionate of all griefs, and the unkind sword of fate that had pierced her gentle breast rendered her delicately cautious of ever wounding, by so much as a word or a look, the sensitive feelings of others. Death and circumstance had made her the independent mistress of a large fortune, which she used lavishly for the private doing of good where evil abounded. Into the foul and festering slums of the great city—into the shabby dwellings of poorly paid clerks and half-starved curates,—up among the barely furnished attics where struggling artists worked for scanty livelihood and the distant hope of fame, “Kiss-Letty” took her sweet and gracious presence, wearing a smile that was a very good reflex of God’s sunshine, and speaking comfort in a voice as tender as that of any imagined angel bringing God’s messages. Much of the grinding of the ceaseless wheel of tribulation did Miss Letitia see, as she went to and fro on her various errands of mercy and friendship; but perhaps among all the haunts and homes where her personality was familiar, her interest had seldom been more strongly aroused than in the ill-ordered household in Hereford Square, where Captain the Honourable D’Arcy-Muir drank and swore, and his wife “slovened” the hours away in muddle and misanthropy. For here was Boy,—Boy, a soft, smiling morsel of helpless life and innocent expectancy,—Boy, who stretched out plump mottled arms to “Kiss-Letty,” and said, chucklingly, “Ullo!”—(an exclamation he had picked up from the friendly policeman at the corner of the square, who greeted him thus when he went out in his perambulator)—“Ullo! ’Ows ’oo, Kiss-Letty? Wants Boy out! Kiss-Letty take Boy wiz her walk-talk.”

Which observation, rendered into heavier English, implied that Boy politely enquired after Miss Letitia’s health, and desired to go out walking and likewise talking with that lady.

And no one in all the world responded more promptly or more lovingly to Boy’s delightful amenities than Miss Letitia did. The wisely-sweet expression of the child’s face fascinated her,—she saw in Boy the possibilities of noble manhood, graced perhaps by the rarest gifts of genius. Believers in hereditary development would have asked her how she could imagine it possible for a child born of such parents to possess an ideal or exceptionally endowed nature? To which she would have replied that she did not believe in the heritage so much as the environment of life. Here she was partly wrong and partly right. Such inexplicable things happen in the evolution of one particular human being from a whole chain of other human beings that it is impossible to gauge correctly the result of the whole. Why, for example, the poet Keats should have had such indifferent parentage will always be somewhat of a mystery. And why men, lineally descended from “ancient, noble and honourable” families should, in this day, have degenerated into turf-gamblers, drunkards and social rascals generally, is also a bewildering conundrum. In the case of Keats, birth and environment were against him,—in the case of the modern aristocrat birth and environment are with him. The one has become an English classic; the other is an English disgrace. Who shall clear up the darkness surrounding the working of this law? Miss Letitia made no attempt to penetrate such physiological obscurities,—she simply argued that for Boy to be brought up in a “muddle,” and set face to face with the ever-present whisky-bottle, was decidedly injurious to his future prospects. The D’Arcy-Muirs were poor, though they had “expectations,”—she, Miss Letitia, was rich. She had no relatives,—no one in the world had the least claim upon her,—and she had serious thoughts of adopting Boy. Would his parents part with him? That was a knotty point, a delicate and very doubtful question. But she had considered it for some time carefully, and had come to the reasonable conclusion that, as Boy seemed to be rather in the way of his father and mother than otherwise, and that moreover, as her terms of adoption were inclusive of making him her sole heir, it was probable she might gain the victory. And the very day on which this true narrative begins, when Captain the Honourable was executing his whisky war-dance to the accompaniment of his son’s murmured “Poo Sing!” and rhythmic spoon-tapping, was the one selected by the gentle lady to commence operations, or, as she put it, “to break the proposition gradually” to the strange parents whose daily lives furnished such a singular example of wedded felicity to their observant offspring. When her dainty brougham, drawn by its sleek and spirited roans, drew up at the door of the house in Hereford Square, there were various signs even outside that habitation to fill the order-loving spirit of Miss Letitia with doubtful qualms and hesitations. To begin with, there was not a blind in any of the windows that was drawn up straight; they were all awry. This gave the dwelling a generally squinting, leering, look which was not pleasant. Then again, the doorsteps were dirty. There were strange, smeary pieces of paper floating down the area, in grimy companionship with broken bits of straw. The bell-handle hung out of its socket, somewhat like an eye undergoing the latest surgical operation for cataract. There were recent traces of coal on the pavement,—a ton had evidently just been shot down the “hole-into-the-cellar” arrangement which some brilliant British “bright idea” has invented for the greater accumulation of dirt in the streets; and the coal-men had not troubled to “clean up” after the performance. Miss Letitia, stepping lightly out of her carriage, was compelled to crunch the heels of her pretty little brodequins in coal-dust, and soil the delicate edge of her frilled silk petticoat in the same. Cautiously she handled the helpless-looking bell-pull, with the result that a hollow tinkling sound awakened the interior echoes. The door opened, and a slatternly maid-servant appeared.

“Is Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir——?”

“Yes, ’m, at home to you, ’m, of course, ’m. But she’s hout to most, on account of master’s bein’ orful bad. Orful bad he is. Step in, please ’m.”

Whereupon Miss Letitia “stepped in,” asking pleasantly as she did so,—

“And how is dear Boy?”

“Oh, jes’ the same, ’m! Allus smilin’ an’ comfoble-like. Never see such a child for good temper. Seems allus a-thinkin’ pretty. This way, ’m!”

And she escorted her visitor into a small side-room which Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir called her “boudoir,”—announcing briskly,—

“Miss Leslie, ’m!”

“Dear me!” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, clad in the usual short skirt and ill-fitting blouse, rose to receive the in-coming guest.

“How nice of you, Letitia, to come! So early too! I’m afraid luncheon has been cleared—”

“Pray don’t speak of it,” interrupted Miss Leslie—“of course at four o’clock——”

“Is it four? Dear me!” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir smiled sleepily. “Why, then it’s time for tea. You will have some tea?”

“Thank you!” murmured Miss Letty, “but don’t put yourself out in any way. Is Boy——?”

“Quite well? Oh yes!” and Boy’s mother rang the bell as she spoke. “Boy is in the dining-room with his father. He has just had his bread-and-milk. I have left him there because I think he keeps Jim a little bit in order. Jim is really quite impossible to-day,—but of course he wouldn’t hurt the child.”

“Do you mean,” said Miss Letitia, her cheeks growing paler, “that your husband is ... well!—you know! And that Boy is with him while in that terrible condition?”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir laughed.

“Of course! How horrified you look, Letitia! But you have no idea how useful Boy is in that way. He really saves pounds’ worth of furniture. When Boy is strapped in his chair, and Jim is on the booze, Jim never knocks the things about as he would if he were alone,—because you see he is afraid of upsetting Boy. It is not out of kindness to Boy exactly, but simply because he hates to hear a child yell. It gets on his nerves. Then of course Boy thinks his father is ill, and pities him so much that the two get on together capitally.”

And this lymphatic lump of a woman laughed again, the while Miss Letitia gazed blankly at the fireplace and endeavoured to control her indignant feelings. The maidservant came in just then in answer to the bell.

“Bring the tea, Gerty,”—commanded her mistress with quite a grand air, as one who should say “bid the thousand menials in the outer court of the castle serve me with delicacies on their bended knees.”

Gerty had a severe cold, and sniffed violently and unbecomingly.

“Please ’m, the milkman ain’t been yet. This mornin’ he said as he might be late, as there was a family t’other side of the square as liked their meals punctual, and he guessed he’d have to go that side first instead of ours. And there ain’t none left from the mornin’; Master Boy’s ’ad it all.”

“Dear, sweet, greedy little pig!” smiled Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir affably. “Well, you can bring the teacups and the teapot, and the kettle and the bread-and-butter—and—Oh! there is condensed milk, I know: will you have condensed milk, Letitia?”

Miss Letitia responded somewhat primly,—

“No, certainly not!” Then, regretting her rather sharp tone of voice, she added, “You must not think me fanciful, but I cannot bear condensed milk in my tea. You know I come of an old Devonshire family, and I believe I grew up on genuine milk and genuine cream.”

“Oh, but condensed milk is quite genuine!” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir. “I love it! I eat it on bread-and-butter often instead of jam; you must not have old maids’ prejudices, Letitia!” And she smiled the provoking smile of a superior being who knows all the best things of life without teaching or experience.

Miss Letty sat patiently under the verdict of “old maids’ prejudices,” wondering how on earth she was going to broach the subject which was uppermost in her mind to this woman who seemed for the moment to have absorbed all the intellect of which she was capable into the bland consideration of condensed milk. She started the conversation again hesitatingly.

“Is Captain D’Arcy-Muir likely to go out presently, do you think?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” replied Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, still smiling. “You see he can scarcely stand—he won’t dress himself properly—and he has just taken to singing: listen!” And she held up a fat forefinger to invite attention. Miss Letitia had no need to strain her ears for the extraordinary sounds which came fitfully through the door,—sounds between a cough and a yell, wherewith were intermingled the familiar words—

“Ole King Co—ole
Was a jo—olly old so—ul!”

“Pray, pray!” implored Miss Letty nervously,—“do get Boy out of that room! Really, my dear, it isn’t fit for the child. I beg of you! I—I—should like to see Boy!”

“Well, I can’t go and fetch him,” declared Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir with a deeply-injured expression; “I should only get pushed out of the room, or hit in the eye, if I attempted it when Jim is like this. But I’ll send Gerty.”

And as Gerty just then entered with all the necessities for tea, minus the milk, she added,

“Fetch Master Boy in here, will you?”

“Yes, ’m. If he’ll come with me.”

She disappeared to fulfil her mission.

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir sank back into the depths of her easy-chair with the manner of one who has done every duty that could possibly be expected of her. Miss Letitia clasped and unclasped her neatly gloved hands nervously. The noises of mingled coughing and yelling increased in ferocity,—and soon they were broken by two widely differing sounds,—a drunken curse, and a child’s laughter.

“D——n you, get out of this!”

“Kiss-Letty! Ooo—ee! My kissy-kissy Kiss-Letty!”

And escaping from Gerty’s hand, Boy literally danced into the room.

CHAPTER II

Making straight for Miss Letitia, the jumping bundle of dimples, gold curls, short knickers and waggling pinafore, came with a wild bound into that lady’s arms.

“Oo-ee!” he once more exclaimed—“Vi’lets!”

And, discovering a bunch of those sweet blossoms half-hidden in the folds of Miss Leslie’s soft lace necktie, he burrowed his little nose into them with delighted eagerness,—then looking up again, and smiling angelically, he repeated in a dulcet murmur, “’Es! Vi’lets! Oo’ is vezy sweet, zoo Kiss-Letty!”

Miss Letitia pressed him to her breast, patted him, smoothed his tousled locks, and took off his loosely-hanging pinafore, thereby disclosing his whole chubby form, clad in what city tailors euphoniously term a ‘small gent’s Jack Tar.’

“Well, Boy!” she said, her gentle voice trembling with quite a delicious cooing sweetness—“how are you to-day?”

“Me vezy well,” answered Boy placidly, twining round his dumpy fingers a long delicately-linked gold chain which ‘Kiss-Letty’ always wore—“Vezy well ’sank ’oo!” (this with a big sigh). “Me awfoo’ bozzered” (bothered) “’bout Dads! Poo Sing! Vezy—vezy ill!”

And Boy conveyed such a heartrending expression of deep distress into his beautiful blue eyes, that Miss Letitia was quite touched, and was almost persuaded into a sense of pity for the degraded creature who was “putting a thief into his mouth to steal away his brains,” in the opposite room.

“You see, Letitia,” murmured Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir with a fat complacent smile—“You see just how Boy takes it? He and his father are the most perfect friends in the world!”

Good Miss Leslie looked as she felt,—pained and puzzled. How was she to broach the idea she had of adopting Boy, if he was already considered by his stupid mother to be a sort of stop-gap or “buffer” between herself and the drunken rages of her “honourable” lord and master? She resolved to temporize.

“I have been wondering,” she began gently, as she settled the little fellow more comfortably on her lap “whether you would let Boy come and stay with me for a few days——”

“Stay with you!” exclaimed Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir—and so surprised was she that she actually lifted her bulky form an inch or two out of its sunken attitude in the arm-chair—“With you, Letitia? A child like that? Why, you would not know in the least what to do with him!”

“I think I should,” submitted Miss Letty, with a little smile,—“Besides, of course you could send Gerty with him if you liked. But I do not think it would be necessary. I have an excellent maid who is devoted to children;—and then he could have a large room to play about in—and——”

“Oh, it would never do!—never—never!” declared Boy’s mother, shaking her head with a half-reproachful, half-compassionate air. “You see, my dear Letitia, it is not as if you were married and had children of your own. You wouldn’t understand how to manage Boy a bit.”

“You think not?” said Miss Letty patiently. “Well—perhaps I might be a little ignorant—but would you let me try?”

“I could not—I really could not!” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir smoothed her floppy blouse over her massive bosom with a protective pat of her large hand. “Boy would simply break his heart without me. Wouldn’t you, Boy?”

Boy thus adjured, looked round enquiringly. He had been busy arranging “Kiss-Letty’s” gold chain in loops and twists, such as pleased his fancy, and thus employed, had failed to follow the conversation.

“How wouldn’t Boy?” he demanded.

“Boy wouldn’t like to leave Muzzy,” explained Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir unctuously—“would he?”

Boy was still meditatively concerned with the looping of the gold chain.

“Leave Muzzy?” he queried. “Wha’ for?”

“What for?” echoed his mother. “To go with Miss Letty—all by your own self—and no kind good Muzzy to take care of you!”

Boy stopped twisting the gold chain. Things began to look serious. He put one rosy finger into his rosier mouth, and started to consider the question. “No kind good Muzzy to take care of you.” Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir was her own trumpeter on this occasion. That she was a “kind good Muzzy” was entirely her own idea. If Boy had been able to express himself with thorough lucidity, he would most probably have given the palm for “kindness and goodness,” and “taking care of him,” to the servant Gerty, rather than to Muzzy. But his little heart told him he ought to love his Muzzy best of all—and yet—how about “Kiss-Letty”? He hesitated.

“Me loves Muzzy vezy much,” he murmured, lowering his pretty eyes,—while his sensitive little underlip began to quiver—“But me loves Kiss-Letty too. Me would like out wiz Kiss-Letty!”

And having thus taken courage to declare his true sentiments, he felt more independent, and raised his golden head with a curious little air of defiance and appeal intermingled. Just then a diversion occurred in the entrance of the servant Gerty, carrying a jug.

“Oh, here is the milk at last!” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, with a sigh of relief. “Now we can have tea. Gerty, what do you think?—here is Miss Leslie wanting to take Boy to stay with her for a few days! Did ever you hear of such a thing!”

Gerty sniffed her usual sniff, which as she gave it, almost amounted to an enigma.

“I should let him go, ’m, if I were you, ’m,” she said, whereat Miss Letty could have embraced her. “He ain’t doin’ no good ’ere, with the master on in his tearin’ tantrums an’ swillin’ whisky fit to bust hisself, an’ really there’s no tellin’ what might happen. Oh yes, ’m,—I should let him go, ’m!”

“Would you really?” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir rose and lolled herself lazily along to the tea-table—“Well!—Do you want him to-day, Letitia?”

“Why, yes, I can take him at once,” replied Miss Leslie, quite trembling with excitement, and commending Gerty to all the special favours of providence for the evident influence she exerted on the flabby mind of her mistress—“Nothing will please me better.”

“Such a funny notion of yours!” smiled Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, hovering over the tea-things like a sort of large loosely-feathered bird. “You are such a regular old maid, Letitia, that I should have thought you wouldn’t have had a child messing about in your beautiful house for the world. However, if you really want him, take him,—but you must have him alone—I can’t spare Gerty.”

Gerty smiled broadly.

“Oh, Miss Leslie won’t want me, ’m,” she cheerfully declared. “Master Boy don’t give no trouble. Shall I put his clothes together, ’m? He ain’t got nothing but his white flannel sailor-suit and two little shirts and nightgowns.”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir sighed wearily.

“Oh dear, don’t bother me about such things!” she said. “Just make a brown-paper parcel of what you think the child will want for a week, and put it in Miss Leslie’s brougham. You came in your brougham, Letitia? Of course. Yes. That will be all right. Put it all in the brougham, Gerty.”

“Yes, ’m. Shall I bring in Master Boy’s hat and overcoat in here?”

“Certainly. Dear me, what a fuss!” Here Gerty promptly left the room. “One would think the child was going to the wilds of Africa! Do you take sugar, Letitia? Yes? Ah, you are not inclined to be at all stout, are you?”—this with a somewhat envious glance at Miss Leslie’s still perfectly graceful and svelte figure—“No, I should think you must be nearly all skin and bone. Now, I can never take sugar. I put on flesh directly. Here is your tea. Boy, do you want any more milk?”

Boy had, during the past few minutes, remained in a condition of bland staring. Vague notions that his “wanting out” with Kiss-Letty was going to be a granted and accomplished fact, pleased his little brain, but he had no skill to discourse on his sensations, even in broken language. He was however too happy to require any extra feeding. He therefore declined the offer of ‘more milk’ with a negative shake of his gold curls, and after a little further consideration, clambered off Miss Letitia’s knee and went to his mother.

“Me goin’ out wiz Kiss-Letty?” he inquired with a solemn air.

“Yes. You are going to stay with her in her grand big house, away from poor Muzzy”—replied the ‘poor Muzzy’ in question, taking a large mouthful of bread-and-butter and swallowing it down with a gulp of tea. “And I hope you’ll be a good boy.”

“’Ope me be a goo’ boy!” he echoed thoughtfully. “’Ess! Me tell Dads?”

Miss Letitia looked startled,—Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir smiled.

“No. You had better not tell Dads. He is ill, you know. When you come back he will be quite well.”

“Sink so?” queried Boy dubiously.

“Think so? Of course I think so. Now don’t stand staring there. Here’s your picture-book,—look at that till Gerty brings you your hat and coat.”

Boy took the interesting volume offered him, docilely, but without enthusiasm. He knew it well. Its torn covers,—the impossible beasts and birds depicted within it,—the extraordinary jumble of rhymes which Gerty would read to him at odd moments, and which he would afterwards think about in pained silence,—all these things worried him. There was a large and elaborately ornamented B in the book, and—twisted in and out its curly formation—were two designs which were utterly opposed to each other,—a cricket-bat and a bumble-bee. The ‘poetry’ accompanying it said—

Fetch me the BAT
To kill the RAT.

After this ferocious couplet came the flamboyant coloured drawing of a large yellow flower, unlike any flower ever born in any field of the wide world. The yellow flower being duly considered as a growth of distinct individuality, other two lines appeared—

Look here and see
The BUMBLE-BEE.

This particular page of his “picture-book” had often puzzled Boy. When Gerty had first read to him—

Fetch me the BAT
To kill the RAT,

he had at once asked,—

“Where rat?”

Gerty had sought everywhere all over the ornate capital letter and the other designs on the page for the missing animal,—but in vain. Therefore she had been reluctantly compelled to admit the depressing truth,—

“There ain’t no rat, Master Boy dear!”

“Why no rat?” pursued Boy, solemnly.

Driven to desperation, a bright idea suddenly crossed Gerty’s brain.

“I ’xpect it’s cos it’s killed,” she said,—“See, Master Boy! It’s ‘a bat to kill a rat.’ And the rat’s killed!”

“Poo’ rat!” commented Boy thoughtfully—“Gone! Poo’—Poo’ rat!—gone altogezzer!”

He sighed,—and refused to ‘look here and see, the Bumble-bee.’ He really wished to know who it was that had asked for a bat to kill a rat, and why that unknown individual had been so furiously inclined. But he kept these desires to himself; for he had an instinctive sense that though Gerty was all kindness, she was not quite the person to be trusted with his closest confidences.

Just now he went into a corner, picture-book in hand, and sat, watching his ‘Muzzy’ and ‘Kiss-Letty’ taking tea together. Muzzy’s back was towards him, and he could not help wondering why it was so big and broad? Why it was so difficult to get round Muzzy for example? He had no such trouble with Kiss-Letty. She was so slim and yet so strong,—and once, when she had lifted him up and carried him from one room to the other, he felt as though he were ‘throned light in air,’ so easy and graceful had been the way she bore him. Now Muzzy always took hold of him as if he were a lump. Not that he argued this fact at all in his little mind,—he was simply thinking—thinking,—yes, if the sober truth must be told, he was thinking quite sadly and seriously how it happened that Muzzy was ugly and Kiss-Letty pretty! It was such a pity Muzzy was ugly!—for surely it was ugly to have red blotches on the face, and hair like the arm-chair stuffing? Such a pity—such a pity for Muzzy? Such a pity too for Boy! Ah, and such a pity it is for all idle, slovenly women who “let themselves go” and think their children ‘take no notice’ of indolence, dirt, and discordant colours. The sense of beauty and fitness was very strong in Boy. Where he got it was a mystery,—it was certainly not a heritage derived from either of his parents. He did not know that ‘Kiss-Letty’ was many years older than ‘Muzzy,’—but he did know that she was ever so much more charming and agreeable to look at. He judged by appearances,—and these were all in ‘Kiss-Letty’s’ favour. For in truth the elderly spinster looked a whole decade younger than the more youthful married woman. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, though she took life with such provokingly indifferent ease, ‘wore’ badly,—Miss Leslie, despite many concealed sorrows and disappointments, wore well. Her face was still rounded and soft-complexioned,—her eyes were bright and clear,—while her figure was graceful and her dress choice and elegant. Boy indeed thought ‘Kiss-Letty’ very beautiful, and he was not without experience. Several well-known “society beauties” of the classed and labelled sort, who are hawked about in newspaper ‘fashionable’ columns as wearing blue or green, or “looking lovely in white,” and “stately in pink”—were wont to visit Captain the Honourable and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir on their ‘at-home’ days, and Boy was always taken into the drawing-room to see them,—but somehow they made no impression on him. They lacked something—though he could not tell what that something was. None of them had the smile of Kiss-Letty, or her soft dove-like glance of eye. Peering at her now from his present corner Boy considered her a very angel of loveliness. And he was actually going away with her, to her ‘grand big house,’ Muzzy said. Boy tried to think what the ‘grand big house’ would be like. The nearest approach his imagination could make to it was Aladdin’s palace, as pictured in one of the ‘fairy landscapes’ of a certain magic lantern which a very burly gentleman, a Major Desmond, had brought to him at Christmas. Major Desmond was a large, jovial, white-haired, white-moustached personage, with a rollicking mellow laugh, and an immense hand which, whenever it was laid on Boy’s head, caressed his curls with the gentleness of a south wind touching the petals of a flower. Muzzy’s hand was hard and heavy indeed compared to the hand of Major Desmond. Major Desmond was a friend of Kiss-Letty’s,—that was all Boy knew about him,—that and the magic-lantern incident. Ruffling and crinkling up the pages of the too-familiar ‘picture book’ mechanically, Boy went on with his own little quaint sequence of thought,—till suddenly, just as Muzzy and Kiss-Letty had finished their tea, a dull crash was heard in the opposite room, accompanied by a loud oath—then came silence. Boy trotted out of his corner, his little face pale with fright.

“Oh Poo’ Sing!” he cried. “Dads ill!—Dads hurted! Me go to Dads!”

“No—no!” and Miss Letty hastened to him and caught him in her arms—“No, dear! Wait a minute! Wait, darling! Let Mother see first what is the matter.”

Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir had risen, and was about to open the door and make some casual inquiry, when Gerty came in, somewhat pale but giggling.

“It’s only master, ’m,” she said. “His foot tripped, and down he fell. He ain’t hurt hisself. He don’t even trouble to get up—he’s just a-sittin’ on the floor with the whisky-bottle as comfoble as you please!”

Miss Letty shuddered as she listened, and clasped Boy more warmly to her heart, placing her gentle hands against his ears lest he should hear too much.

“Papa’s all right, Boy dear,” she said.—“He has just let something fall on the floor. See?”

“Zat all?” queried Boy with an anxious look.

“That’s all. Now”—and Miss Letitia took his dumpy wee hand in her own and led him across the room—“come along, and we’ll have a nice drive together, shall we? Gerty, have you got Master Boy’s things?”

“Yes, ’m.” And Gerty, flopping down on both knees in front of the little fellow, pulled a miniature overcoat round his tiny form and stuck a sailor-hat (marked ‘Invincible’ on the ribbon) jauntily on his head—“There you are, Master Boy, dear! Ain’t you grand, eh? Going away visiting all by your own self! Quite like a big man!”

Boy smiled vaguely but sweetly, and turned one of the buttons on his coat round and round meditatively. Quite like a big man, was he? Well, he did not feel very big, but on the contrary particularly small—and especially just now, because Muzzy was standing upright, looking down upon him with a spacious air of infinite and overwhelming condescension. Surely Muzzy was a very large woman?—might not one say extra large? Boy stretched out his hand and grasped her skirt, gazing wistfully up at the bulk above him,—the bulk which now stooped, like an over-full sack of wheat toppling forward, to kiss him and bid him good-bye.

“Remember, you’ve never been away from me before, Boy,”—and ‘Muzzy’ spoke in a kind of injured tone—“so I hope you will be good and obedient, and keep your clothes clean. And when you get to Miss Leslie’s house, don’t smear your fingers on the walls, and mind you don’t break anything. You know it won’t be as it is here, where you can tumble about as you like all day and play——”

“Oh, but he can!” interposed Miss Leslie hastily—“I assure you he can!”

“Pardon me, Letitia, he can not”—and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir swelled visibly with matronly obstinacy as she spoke—“It is not likely that in your house you can have wooden soldiers all over the floor. It would be impossible. Boy has very odd ways with his soldiers. He likes to ‘camp them out’ in different spots of the pattern on the carpet—and of course it does make a place untidy. When one is a mother, one does not mind these things”—this with a superior and compassionate air—“but you, with your precise notions of order, will find it very trying.”

Miss Leslie protested, with a little smile, that really she had no particularly ‘precise’ notions of order.

“Oh yes, you have,” declared Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir emphatically—“Don’t tell me you haven’t, Letitia,—all old maids are the same. Then there is that dreadful Cow of Boy’s,—the thing Major Desmond gave him, along with the magic lantern,—he can do without the lantern, of course—but I really am afraid he had better take his Cow!”

Miss Letitia laughed—and a very pretty, musical little laugh she had.

“Oh, by all means let us have the Cow!” she said gaily. “Where is it, Boy?”

Boy looked up, then down,—to the east, to the west, and everywhere into the air, without committing himself to a reply. Gerty came to the rescue.

“I’ll fetch it,” she said briskly. “I saw it on Master Boy’s bed a minute ago.”

She left the room, to return again directly with the interesting animal in question—quite a respectably-sized toy cow with a movable head which wagged up and down for a long time when set in motion by the touch of a finger. It had a blue ribbon round its neck, and Boy called it ‘Dunny.’ He welcomed it now as he saw it with the confiding smile of long and experienced friendship.

“Ullo Dunny!” he said—“Wants out wiz Boy? Tum along zen!” And receiving the pasteboard quadruped in his arms he embraced it with effusion.

“It is most absurd!” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir grandiosely—“Still it would be rather awkward for you, Letitia, if he were to start crying for his Cow!”

“It would indeed!” and the laughter still lighted up Miss Letitia’s soft eyes with a keen and merry twinkle—“I would not be without the Cow for worlds!”

Something in her voice or smile caused Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir to feel slightly cross. There was an unmistakable air of youth about this “old maid”—a sense of fun and a spirit of enjoyment which were not in ‘Muzzy’s’ composition. And ‘Muzzy’ straightway got an idea into her head that she was “out of it,” as it were,—that Miss Letitia, Boy and ‘Dunny’ all understood each other in a manner which she could never grasp, and knew the way to a fairy-land where she could never follow. And it was with a touch of snappishness that she said,—

“Well!—if you are going, hadn’t you better go? My husband will probably be coming in here soon,—and he might perhaps make some objection to Boy’s leaving——”

“Oh, I won’t run the risk of that!” answered Miss Leslie quickly. “Come along, Boy!—say good-bye to Mother!”

Holding his ‘Cow’ with one hand to his breast, Boy raised his pretty little face to be kissed again.

“Goo’ bye, Muzzy dee-ar!” he murmured—“’Ope Dads better soon! Kiss Dads for Boy!”

This was his parting message to the drunkard in the next room,—and having uttered it, he drew a long breath as of one who prepares to plunge into unknown seas, and resigned himself to ‘Kiss-Letty,’ who led him gently along, accommodating her graceful swift step to his toddling movements, through the hall and outside to her brougham, where the footman in attendance, smiling broadly at the sight of Boy, lifted the little fellow in, and seated him cosily on the soft cushions. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir and the servant Gerty watched his departure from the house door.

“I will take every care of him!” called Miss Letitia, as she followed her small guest into her carriage—“Don’t be at all anxious!”

She waved her hand,—the footman shut the door, and mounted the box,—and in another minute the smart little equipage had turned the corner of Hereford Square and disappeared. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir remained for a few seconds on the steps of her house, airing herself largely, and patronising with a casual glance the clear blue of the afternoon sky.

“What a vain old woman that Miss Leslie is!” she remarked to Gerty—“Really she tries to pass herself off as about thirty!”

Gerty sniffed, as usual.

“Oh, I don’t think so, ’m!” she said—“I don’t think she tries to pass herself off as anything, ’m! And I wouldn’t never call her vain. She’s just the real lady, every inch of her, and of course she can’t help herself lookin’ nice. And what a mercy it is for Master Boy to be took away just now!—for I didn’t like to mention it before, ’m, but I don’t know what we’re goin’ to do with the Cap’en,—he’s goin’ on worse than ever,—an he’s bin an’ torn nearly every mossel of his clothes off,—an’ a puffeckly disgraceful sight he is, ’m, lyin’ sprawled on the floor a-playin’ ‘patience’!”

CHAPTER III

Miss Letitia’s house, her “great big house,” as Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir had expansively described it to Boy, was situated on the sunniest side of Hans Place. It was tastefully built, and all the window-ledges had floral boxes delightfully arranged with flowers growing in pots and hanging baskets, over which on warm bright days spacious crimson-and-white awnings stretched forth their protective shade, giving the house-front quite a gay and foreign effect. The door was white, and a highly-polished brass knocker glinted in the sunshine with an almost knowing wink, as much as to say—“Use me—And you shall see—Hospitalitee!” When Miss Letty’s brougham drove up, however, this same knowing knocker was not called into requisition, for the butler had heard the approaching wheels, and had seen the approaching trotting roans through a little spy-window of his own in the hall, so that before Miss Letty had stepped from the vehicle and had “jumped” her small visitor out also, the door was opened and the butler himself stood, a sedate figure of civil welcome on the threshold. Without betraying himself by so much as a profane smile, this dignitary of the household accepted the Cow and the brown paper parcel which constituted all Boy’s belongings. He took them, so to speak, to his manly bosom, and then, waving away the carriage, coachman, footman and horses with a slight yet stately gesture, he shut the house door and followed his “lady” and the “young gentleman” through the hall into a room which beamed with light, warmth and elegance,—Miss Letty’s morning-room or boudoir—where, with undisturbed serenity he set the Cow on the table between a cabinet portrait of Mr. Balfour and a small bronze statuette of Mercury. The Cow looked rather out of place there, but it did not matter.

“Will you take tea, Madam?” he asked, in a voice rendered mellifluous by the constant and careful practice of domestic gentleness.

“No, thank you, Plimpton,” replied Miss Letty cheerfully; “we have had tea. Just ring the bell for Margaret, will you?”

Plimpton bowed, and withdrew, not forgetting to deposit the brown paper parcel on a chair as he made his exit. Boy stood speechless, gazing round him in a state of utter bewilderment, and only holding to any sense of reality in things by keeping close to “Kiss-Letty,” and for the further relief of his mind glancing occasionally at the familiar “Dunny,” who presented the appearance of grazing luxuriously on an embroidered velvet table-cloth. Instinctively aware of the little fellow’s sudden shyness and touch of fear, Miss Letty did not allow him to remain long oppressed by his vague trouble. Kneeling down beside him, she took off his hat, pulled him out of his tiny overcoat, and kissed his little fat cheeks heartily.

“Now you are at home with Kiss-Letty,” she said, smiling straight into his big innocent blue eyes,—“aren’t you?”

Boy’s breath came and went quickly—his heart beat hard. He lifted one dumpy hand and dubiously inserted a forefinger through the loops of Miss Letty’s ever-convenient neck-chain. Then he smiled with responsive sweetness into the kind face so close to his own.

“’Ess,” he murmured very softly, “Boy wiz Kiss-Letty! But me feels awfoo’ funny!”

Miss Letitia laughed and kissed him again.

“Feels awfoo’ funny, do you?” she echoed. “Oh, but I feel just the same, Boy! It’s awfoo’ funny for me to have you here all to myself, don’t you think so?”

Boy’s smile broadened—he began to chuckle,—there was the glimmering perception of a joke somewhere in his brain. Just at that moment a comfortable-looking woman in a neat black dress, with a smart white apron, entered, and to her Miss Letty turned.

“This is the dear little fellow I told you about, Margaret,” she said, “the only son of the D’Arcy-Muirs. Master Boy he is called. Boy, will you say ‘how do you do’ to Margaret?”

Boy looked up. He was easier in his mind now and felt much more at home.

“How do, Margit?” he said cheerfully. “Me tum to stay wiz Kiss-Letty.”

“Bless the wee laddie!” exclaimed Margaret in the broad soft accent of Inverness, of which lovely town she was a proud native; and down she flopped on her knees, already the willing worshipper of one small child’s winsomeness. “And a grand time ye’ll have of it, I’m thinking, if ye’re as good as ye’re bonnie! Come away wi’ me now and I’ll wash ye’r bit handies and put on anither suit,” for her quick eye had perceived the brown paper parcel while her quick mind had guessed its contents. “And what time will he be for bed, mem?”

“What time do you go to bed, Boy?” asked Miss Letty, caressing his curls.

“Eight klock!” responded Boy promptly; “Gerty puts me in barf and zen in bed.”

Both Miss Leslie and her maid laughed.

“Well, it will be just the same to-night,” said ‘Kiss-Letty’ gaily; “only it will be Margaret instead of Gerty. But it’s a long way off eight o’clock,—you go with Margaret now, and she will bring you back to me in the drawing-room, and there you shall see some pictures.”

Boy smiled at the prospect,—he was ready for anything now. He put his hand trustfully in that of Margaret, merely observing in a casual sort of way—

“Dunny tum wiz me.”

Margaret looked round enquiringly.

“He means his Cow,” explained Miss Letty, taking that animal from its velvet pasture-land and handing it to her maid, who received it quite respectfully. “Just remember, Margaret, will you, that he likes the Cow on his bed! It sleeps with him always.”

Mistress and maid exchanged a laughing glance, and then Boy trotted off. Miss Letty watched him slowly stumping up her handsome staircase, holding on to Margaret’s hand and chattering all the way, and a sudden haze of tears blinded her sight. What she had missed in her life!—what she had missed! She thought of it with no selfish regret, but only a little aching pain, and even now she stilled that pain with a prayer—a prayer that though God had not seen fit to bless her with the love of husband or children she might still be of use in the world,—of use perchance if only to shield and benefit this one little human life of Boy’s which had attracted so much of her interest and affection. And with this thought, dismissing her tears, she went up to her own room, changed her walking dress for a graceful tea-gown of black Chantilly lace which clothed her slender figure with becoming ease and dignity, and went into her drawing-room, where, near the French window which opened into a beautiful conservatory, stood a bluff, big gentleman with a white moustache, chirruping tenderly to a plump bullfinch, which made no secret of the infinite surprise it felt at such strange attempts to imitate melodious warbling. Miss Leslie uttered a low exclamation of pleasure.

“Why, Dick,” she said, “this is delightful! I thought you had gone abroad?”

“So I was going,” responded Dick—otherwise Major Desmond, advancing to take Miss Letty’s outstretched hand and raise it gallantly to his lips,—“but just as I was about to start, I read in the newspapers of a fellow—a man who was once in my regiment—who had got insulted by a dirty ragamuffin of a chap in the Custom-house on the French frontier,—and I said to myself—‘What!—am I going out of England to be treated as if I were a thief, and have my portmanteau searched by a Frenchy? No!—as an English officer I won’t submit to it! I will stay at home!’ It was a sudden resolution. You know I’m a fellow to make sudden resolutions, am’t I, Letty? Well, give you my word, I never looked upon Custom-house regulations in the same light as I do now! Come to think of it, you know, directly we leave our own shores we’re treated like thieves and rascals by all the foreigners,—and why should we expose ourselves to it? Eh? I say why?”

Miss Leslie laughed.

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know why,” she answered. “Only I rather wonder you never thought of all this before. You have always gone abroad some time in the year, you know.”

The Major pulled his white moustache thoughtfully.

“Yes, I have,” he admitted. “And why the devil—I beg your pardon!—I have done it I can’t imagine. England’s good enough for anybody. There’s too much gadding about everywhere nowadays. And the world seems to me to shrink in consequence. Shrink! by Jove!—it’s no bigger than a billiard ball!”

Miss Letty smiled, and said “Sweet!” to her bullfinch, which straightway warbled with delightful inaccuracy the quaint air of “The Whistling Coon.”

“Bravo! Bravo!” exclaimed Major Desmond, after listening attentively to the little bird’s performance. “Now why the chap couldn’t do that for me I can’t understand. I have been chirruping to him till my tongue aches—and couldn’t get a note out of him. Only a wink. You just say ‘sweet’ and off he starts. Well, and what have you been doing with yourself, Letty? You look very fit.”

“Oh, I’m always ‘fit’ as you call it,” said Miss Leslie placidly. “I live the same quiet life month after month, you know, and I suppose it’s scarcely possible for anything to go very wrong with me. I have passed through my storm and stress. The days go by now all in the same even, monotonous way.”

Major Desmond took two or three turns up and down the room.

“Well, if you find it even and monotonous to be doing good all your time,” he observed, “I can only say that I wish a few more people would indulge in monotony! But don’t you mean to have a change?”

“Oh, I have provided a little distraction for myself,” said Miss Letty, smiling demurely; “I have got a young man to stay with me for a few days.”

“Young man!” exclaimed the Major. “Well, upon my word——” here he stopped short, for at that moment Boy, attired in his best suit of white flannel, his face shining with recent ablutions, and his golden hair brushed into a shining aureole of curls round his brow, trotted into the room with a cheerful confidence and assertiveness quite wonderful to see.

“Ullo, Major!” he exclaimed: “Zoo tum to see Boy?”

Major Desmond rose to the occasion at once.

“Of course!” he said, and lifting Boy in his arms he set him on his broad shoulder. “Of course I have come to see you! Impossible to keep away knowing you to be here!”

Boy chuckled.

“Me tum to stay wiz Kiss-Letty,” he announced.

“So I perceive,” replied the Major—and turning to Miss Leslie he said, “This is the young man, eh, Letty? Well, however did you manage to get hold of him?”

“I will tell you all about it at dinner,” she answered in a low tone. “You will stay and dine?”

“With pleasure—in fact I hoped you would ask me,” responded the Major frankly; “I’m sick of club food.”

Boy from his lifted position on the Major’s shoulder had been quietly surveying everything in the room. He now pointed to a copy of Burne-Jones’s “Golden Stair.”

“Pitty ladies,” he remarked.

“Yes,” agreed Major Desmond, “very pitty! All so good and sweet and lovely, aren’t they, Boy? Each one sweeter, gooder, lovelier as they come,—and all so full of pleasant thoughts that they have almost grown alike. One ideal of goodness taking many forms!”

He spoke to himself now and not to Boy—and his eyes rested musingly on Miss Letty. She was just setting a large vase of roses on the grand piano. She looked from his distance a very gentle, fragile lady—dainty and elegant too—almost young.

“Kiss-Letty wiz ze roses,” observed Boy.

“Just so!” agreed the Major, “and that is where she always is, Boy! Roses mean everything that is good and sweet and wholesome, and I should not wonder if ‘Kiss-Letty’ was not something of a rose itself in her way!”

“Oh, Dick!” expostulated Miss Letty, “how can you talk such nonsense to the child! What flattery to an old woman like me!”

“Boy doesn’t know whether I’m talking nonsense or the utmost wisdom,” responded the Major undauntedly. “And as I have often told you, you will never be old to me, Letty. You are the best friend I ever had, and if friends are not the roses of life, I should like to know what flowers they do represent! And what I have said before, I say again, that I’m ready to marry you to-morrow if you’ll have me.”

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Miss Leslie, with a little tremulous laugh. “Just think! Saying such a thing before Boy!”

“Boy! I guarantee he doesn’t understand a word I have been talking about. Eh, Boy? Do you know what I have been saying to ‘Kiss-Letty’?”

Boy looked down at him with a profound air of cherubic wisdom.

“Wants marry Kiss-Letty ’morrow if ’ave me,” he said solemnly.

And then Major Desmond had one of his alarming laughs,—a laugh which threatened to dislodge Boy altogether from his position and throw him headlong on the floor. Miss Letty laughed too, but more gently, and on her pale cheeks there was a rosy tinge suggestive of a blush.

“Well, well!” said the Major, recovering from his hilarity at last,—“Boy is not such a fool as he looks, evidently! There, Letty, I won’t tease you any more. But you are very obstinate, you know,—yes, you are! What does Longfellow say?—

‘Trust no future, howe’er pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead:
Act, act, in the living present,
Heart within and God o’erhead.’

That’s wholesome stuff, Letty. I like Longfellow because he is always straight. Some poets go giggetting about in all sorts of dark corners and pop out suddenly upon you with a fire-cracker of a verse which you can’t understand a bit, because all the meaning fizzles out while you are looking at it,—but Longfellow!—‘Let the dead past bury its dead.’ That’s sense, Letty. And ‘Act, act in the living present.’ Why, that’s sense too. And why don’t you do it?”

“I think I try to do it,” answered Miss Letty quietly; “I like to be useful wherever I go. But for me there is no dead past, as you know,—it lives always with me and makes the best and sweetest part of the present.”

“There, I suppose I’ve been putting my foot in it again!” muttered Major Desmond, somewhat disconsolately. “You know I never meant to suggest that you did not do all the good you could and more than is necessary in your life, but what I see in Longfellow’s line is that you should ‘act, act in the living present’ for yourself, Letty. For yourself—make yourself happy, as well as others—make me happy! Now, wouldn’t that be a praiseworthy deed?”

“Not at all,” replied Miss Letty, smiling, “for you deserve to be much happier than I could ever make you. You know there are many charming young women you could marry.”

“No, I don’t know anything of the sort,” said the Major decisively. “The young women of the present day are all hussies—brazen-faced hussies, in my opinion. Girls don’t blush any more nowadays; men blush for them. No—you’re not going to get rid of me in that way, Letty. At my age I’m not going to be such a vain old ass as to go smirking after girls who would only laugh at me behind my back. I don’t believe in philandering, but I believe in love—yes, love at all ages and in all seasons—but it must be the real thing and no sham about it.” Here he stopped, for Boy was wriggling on his shoulder and showing unmistakable signs of wishing to go free; so he gently set him down. “There you are, little chap!—and there you go—straight for the roses and ‘Kiss-Letty’! Lucky rascal!” This as Boy trotted up to Miss Leslie and stretched his short arms caressingly round her soft lace skirts.

“Where’s booful pick-shures?” he demanded; “Boy likes pick-shures.”

Miss Leslie then bethought herself that she had promised he should see some ‘booful pick-shures’ when he came into the drawing-room, and turning towards a pile of éditions de luxe in large quarto of famous works such as “Don Quixote,” “Idylls of the King,” and Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” she hesitated.

“Which shall I give him, Dick?” she asked the Major.

“Put ’em all on the floor and let him choose for himself,” was the reply. “I believe in treating children like lambs and birds—let them frisk and fly about in the fields of general information as they like,—choose their own bits of grass as it were. Now here’s a quintessence of brain for you,”—and he lifted four large volumes off the side-table where they generally stood and placed them on the floor—“Come here, Boy! Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tennyson!—Never heard of ’em, did you? No!—but you will probably have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of all four of ’em in a few years. That’s where the wonderful immortality of genius comes in,—the dead author is spiritually able to shake hands with and talk to each and every generation which follows him. There is a wonderful secret in the power of expressed thought if we could only fathom it. Now, which one are you going for first?”

Boy sat down on the floor and considered. One or two of the big books he opened cautiously and looked in as though expecting to see some strange living object inside,—then he shut them quickly, smiling mysteriously to himself the while. Then in the same doubtful way he peeped into the second volume of Dante entitled “Paradiso”—and lo! a picture of angels ascending and descending—one of Doré’s most wonderful conceptions of forms of light portrayed in a dazzling atmosphere,—and his blue eyes sparkled—he opened the book wider and wider—till the whole page burst upon his view, whereupon he curled down closer still and stared silently. Miss Letty seated herself in a low chair, and took out some dainty embroidery, and while her swift needle went in and out with a bright-coloured silk behind it, which wove a flower as it moved, she watched the little fellow, and Major Desmond sitting opposite to her did the same. The bullfinch began a scrap of his ‘aria’ but broke off to preen his wing,—and there was a silence in the pretty room while Boy’s innocent little face drooped in a rapture over the pictured scene of heavenly glory. Not a word did he utter,—but merely drew a long breath like a sigh, and his eyes darkened with an expression of wistful gravity. Then he turned over a few more pages and came upon that most exquisite “Cross” of Doré’s imagination, where the dying Saviour of the world hangs crucified, but is surrounded at every point by angels. This seemed to fascinate him more than the other, and he remained absorbed for many minutes, enrapt and speechless. Some unaccountable influence held Miss Leslie and her old friend Dick Desmond silent too. The thoughts of both were very busy. The Major had a secret in his soul which, had he declared it, would have well-nigh killed Letitia Leslie,—he knew that the man she had loved, and whose memory she honoured with such faithful devotion, had been nothing but a heartless scamp, who in an unguarded moment had avowed to him, Major Desmond, that he was going to throw over Letty when he got back from India, as he was ‘on’ with a much prettier and wealthier woman; but he had never ‘got back from India’ to carry out his intention—death had seized him in the heyday of his career, and Letty believed he had died loving her, and her only. Who would have undeceived her? Who would have poisoned the faith of that simple trusting heart? Not Dick Desmond certainly; though he had himself loved her for nearly twenty years, and being of a steadfast nature had found it impossible to love any one else. And he was more content to have her as a friend than to have the most charming ‘other woman’ as a wife. And he had jogged on quietly till now—well, now he was fifty, and Letty was forty-five.

“We’re getting on—by Jove, yes!—we’re getting on!” mused Dick. “And just think what that dead rascal out in India has cost us! Our very lives! All sacrificed! Well, never mind!—I would not spoil Letty’s belief in her sweetheart for the world.”

And yet he could not help feeling it to be a trifle ‘hard,’ as he felt the charm of Letty’s quiet presence, and saw Boy bending over Doré’s picture of the “Cross.”

“If—if she would have had me, we might have had a child of our own like that,” he mused dolefully; “and as it is, the poor little chap has got a drunken beast for a father and a slovenly fool for a mother! Well, well—God arranges things in a queer way, and I must say, without irreverence, it doesn’t seem at all a clear or a just way to me. Why the innocent should suffer for the guilty (and they always do) is a mystery.”

Letty, meanwhile, was thinking too. Such sweet and holy thoughts!—thoughts of her dead lover,—her ‘brave, true Harry,’ as she was wont to call him in her own mind—a mind which was as white and pure as the ‘Taj-Mahal,’ and which enshrined this same ‘Harry’ in its midst as a heroic figure of stately splendour and godlike honour. No man was ever endowed by woman with more virtues than Letty gave to her dead betrothed, and her faith in him was so perfect that she had become content with her loneliness because she felt that it was only for a little while,—that soon she and her beloved would meet again never to part. Is it impossible to believe that the steadfast faith and love of a good woman may uplift the departed spirit of an unworthy man out of an uttermost Hell by its force and purity? Surely in these days, when we are discovering what marvellous properties there are in simple light, and the passing of sound through space, it would be foolish to deny the probability of noble Thought radiating to unmeasured distances, and affecting for good those who are gone from us, whom we loved on earth,—and whose present state and form of life we are not as yet permitted to behold. Anyway, whatever wonders lie hidden in waiting for us behind Death’s dark curtain, it may be conceded that the unfaithful soul of the man she loved was in no wise injured by Miss Letty’s remembering tenderness and prayers, but rather strengthened and sustained. She was touched just now by Boy’s admiration of the pictured angels,—and to her always thoughtful mind there was something quaint in the spectacle of the little wondering fellow bending over the abstruse Great Poem of Italy which arose to life and being through the poet’s own Great Wrong. Little did the enemies of Dante dream that their names would be committed to lasting execration in a Hell so immortal as the ‘Inferno,’—though it is to be deplored that so supreme a writer should have thought it worth his while to honour, by handing down to posterity, the names of those who were as nobodies compared with himself. However he, like other old-world poets, was not permitted to see his fate beyond his own lifetime. We are wiser in our generation. We know that the more an author’s work is publicly praised the more likely it is to die quickly and immediately,—and those who desire their thoughts to last, and to carry weight with future generations, should pray for the condemnation of their present compeers in order to be in tune with the slow but steady pulse-beat of Fame. One has only to look back through a few centuries to see the list of the Despised who are now become the Glorious—and a study of contemporary critics on the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, is a very wholesome lesson to the untried writer of books who is afraid of the little acrimonies of Fleet Street. To lead the world one must first be crucified,—this is the chief lesson of practical Christianity.

“Rather curious,” said Major Desmond at last, nodding towards Boy, and speaking softly as if he were in church, “how he seems to like those fanciful things!”

Miss Letty smiled.

“Boy!”

Boy looked up with a start.

“Do you like the picture-book?”

Boy gave no answer in words. He merely nodded and placed one dumpy hand on the “Cross of Angels,” to keep the place. Suddenly, however, he found voice. He had turned over a few more pages, though still careful not to lose the picture he had selected as his favourite, when he stopped and exclaimed breathlessly,—

“Boy bin there!”

The Major, with remarkable alertness, went down on the floor beside him and looked over his golden head.

“Boy been there! Nonsense! What! In that wonderful garden, with all those flowers and trees and lovely angels flying about! Boy couldn’t get there if he tried!”

Boy looked at him with solemnly reproachful eyes.

“Tell ’oo Boy bin there,” he repeated. “Boy seen f’owers and boo’ful people! Boy knows vezy well about it!”

The Major became interested.

“Oh, all right!—I don’t wish to contradict you, little chappie!” he said with a cheery and confidential air,—“But when were you there last, eh?”

Boy considered—his rosy lips tightened, and his fair brows puckered in a frown of mental puzzlement.

“Me dunno,” he replied at last: “long, long time ‘go—awfoo’ long!” and he gave a deep sigh. “Dunno ’ow long—” here he studied the picture again with an approving air of familiarity. “But Boy ’members it;—pitty p’ace,—pitty flowers,—all bwight,—awfoo’ bwight!—’ess! me ’members it!”

The Major got up from his knees, dusted his trousers, and looked quizzically at Miss Letty.

“Odd little rascal,” he observed, sotto voce. “Doesn’t know a bit what he is jabbering about!”

Miss Letty’s soft blue eyes rested on the child thoughtfully.

“I’m not sure about that, Dick,” she said. “We are rather arrogant, we old worldly-wise people, in our estimate of children;—Boy may remember where he came from, and the imagination of a great artist may have recalled to him a true reality.”

Her voice was very sweet,—her face expressed a faith and hope which made it beautiful; and Dick Desmond, in his quick, impulsive fashion, caught one of her little white hands and raised it to his lips with all the gallant grace of a soldier and a gentleman.

“God bless you, Letty!” he said heartily; “I know very well where you came from!—and I don’t want any picture but yourself to remind me of the fact!”

CHAPTER IV

That evening, after Boy had gone to bed, Miss Leslie and the Major discussed the possibilities of his future with great and affectionate interest.

“Of course,” said Desmond, “it is a splendid chance for the boy,—but, Letty, that is just the very reason that I am afraid he will not be allowed to have it. The affairs of humanity are arranged in a very curiously jumbled-up fashion, and I have always found that when some specially good luck appears about to favour a deserving person, something unfavourable comes in the way and prevents him getting it. And Fortune frequently showers her choicest gifts on the most unworthy scoundrels, male and female, that burden this earth’s surface. It’s odd—it’s unfair, but it’s true.”

“Not always,” said Miss Leslie, gently. “You really must not get into the habit of looking on the worst side of life, Dick.”

“I won’t,” responded the Major promptly—“at least, not when you’re looking at me. Out of your sight I can do as I like!”

Miss Letty laughed. Then she returned to the chief subject of interest.

“You see,” she said, “it is not as if the D’Arcy-Muirs were rich and had plenty of opportunities for their son’s advance in life. They certainly have enough to live comfortably on, if they are frugal and careful, but the man is so incorrigible——”

“And the woman,” put in Major Desmond.

“Well, yes—she too is incorrigible in another way,—but after all slovenliness can scarcely be called a sin.”

“I think it can,” said the Major emphatically. “A slovenly woman is an eyesore and creates discord and discomfort by her very appearance. She is a walking offence. And when slovenliness is combined with obstinacy,—by Jove, Letty!—I tell you pigs going the wrong way home are easy driving compared to Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir!”

“Yes, I know!” and for a moment Miss Leslie’s even brows puckered in a little vexed line. “And her obstinacy is of such a strange kind,—all about the merest trifles! She argues on the question of a teacup or a duster to the extreme verge of silliness, but in important matters, such as the health or well-being of her husband—or of Boy—she lets everything go to pieces without a word of protest!”

“Delightful creature!” murmured the Major, sipping his glass of port wine with a relish: they were at dessert, and he was very comfortable,—pleased with the elegance of the table, which glistened with old silver, delicate glass, and tastefully arranged flowers,—and still more pleased with the grace and kindness of his gentle hostess,—“I remember her before Jim married her. A handsome large creature with a slow smile,—one of those smiles which begin in the exact middle of the lips, spread to the corners and gradually widen all over the face,—an indiarubber smile I call it,—but the men who took to her in her young days used to rave over her smile, and one idiot said she had ‘magnificent maternal brows like the Niobe in Florence.’ Good old Niobe! Yes, Letty,—there are a certain set of fellows who always lose their heads on large women,—the larger the better, give you my word! They never consider that the large girl will become a larger matron, and unless attacked by a wasting disease (which heaven forfend) will naturally grow larger every year. And I tell you, Letty, there is nothing in the world that kills a romantic passion so surely and hopelessly as Fat! Ah, you may laugh!—but it is a painful truth. Poetry—moonlight—music—kisses—all that pleasant stuff and nonsense melt before Fat. I have never met a man yet who was in love with a fat, really fat woman! And if a slim girl marries and gets fat in the years to come, her husband, poor chap, may deplore it,—deeply deplore it—but it’s very distressing—he cannot help it—his romance dies under it. Dies utterly! Ah! We’re weak creatures, we men, we cannot stand Fat. We like plumpness,—oh yes! We like round rosy curves and dimples, but not actual Fat. Now, Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir will become—indeed has become Fat.”

“Dear me!” and Miss Leslie laughed, “you really are quite eloquent, Dick! I never heard you go on in this way before. Poor Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir! She really has no alternative——”

“No alternative but to become Fat?” enquired the Major, solemnly glaring over his port wine.

“Now you know I don’t mean it in that way,” laughed Miss Leslie. “You really are incorrigible! What I wished to point out was, that when a woman finds that her husband doesn’t care a bit how she looks or what she wears, she is apt to become careless.”

“It doesn’t follow that because a man is a churl a woman should lose her self-respect,” said the Major. “Surely she should take a pride in being clean and looking as well as she can for her own sake. Then in this particular case there is Boy.”

“Yes—there is Boy,” agreed Miss Letty meditatively. “And he certainly does notice things.”

“Notice things? I should think he does! He is always noticing. He notices his mother’s untidiness, and he notices his father’s disgracefulness. If I were Jim D’Arcy-Muir I should be ashamed to meet that little chap’s eyes.”

Miss Letty sighed.

“Do you think,” she asked after a pause, “they will let me have him?”

The Major considered,—and for some minutes sat twirling the ends of his white moustache reflectively.

“Well, to tell you the truth, Letty, I don’t,” he said at last,—“I don’t believe they will for a moment. Some parents would refuse your offer on account of their love and affection for the child, and their own natural desire not to part with him. That will not be the D’Arcy-Muirs’ reason. They will simply argue that you are trying to ‘patronise’ them. It will be exactly like their muddled minds to put it that way. They will say, ‘She thinks we are going to put our son under obligations to her for her money.’ And though they conduct themselves like pigs they think a great deal of themselves in a ‘county-family’ fashion. No, Letty—I’m afraid you won’t get a chance of doing any good in that quarter. But if you like I will take soundings—that is, I will suggest the idea of such a thing and see how they take it. What do you say?”

“Oh, I wish you would!” said Miss Letty earnestly. “You see you know Captain D’Arcy-Muir——”

“Well, in a way,—yes, I know him in a way,” corrected the Major; “I used to know him better than I do now. He was never in my regiment, thank the Lord! But I will try to get hold of him in a sober moment, and see what can be done. But I don’t give out any hopes of him.”

“Oh, Dick!” sighed Miss Letty.

“Well, I shall be very sorry for your disappointment, Letty,—very sorry—and sorrier still for the little chap, for I think his life literally hangs on the balance of this chance. If he is not allowed to take it, all the worse for him,—he will come to no good, I fear.”

“Don’t say that!” pleaded Miss Leslie, with pain in her voice; “don’t say that!”

“All right, I won’t say it,” said the Major, expressing however in his face and tone of voice that he would probably think it all the same. “But the world is a bad place to fight in if you are not thoroughly well equipped for the battle. God made the world, so we are told, but I doubt whether He wished it to be quite as overcrowded as it is just now. All the professions—all the trades—all the arts—overdone! Army no go,—Navy no go. If you are a soldier and get any chance of facing fire, you know just what your reward is likely to be, unless you are a Kitchener. You may get a V.C., and after that the workhouse, like some of the Crimean heroes. And in the Navy you get literally nothing but very poor pay. The best thing for a man now is to be an explorer, and even when you are that, the world cannot be persuaded to believe that you have explored anything, or been anywhere. You have simply been sitting at home and reading up!” He laughed, and then went on, “If you get Boy what are you going to do with him?”

“I shall see what he likes to do best himself,” said Letty.

“At present he likes to hug you and see ‘pick-shures’ of heavenly places,” said the Major. “That’s a bad sign, Letty! Woman and Art spells ruin like theatrical speculation! Well! Come and have a game of chess with me before I go home to my lonely bachelor rooms;—it is really too bad of you to make a sour old man of me in this way!”

Miss Leslie laughed heartily.

“No one will ever call you a sour old man, Dick,” she said as she rose from the table. “You are the most genial and generous-hearted fellow I know.”

“Then why won’t you have me?” pleaded Desmond.

“Oh, you know why,” said Letty. “What is the use of going over it all again?”

“Going over it all—yes—I know!” said the Major dismally. “You have got it into your head that if you were to marry me, and that then afterwards we died—as we shall do—and went to Heaven—which is a question—you would find your Harry up there in the shape of a stern reproving angel, ready to scold you for having a little happiness and sympathy on earth when he was not there. Now, if things are to be arranged in that way, some folks will be in awful trouble. The ladies who have had several husbands,—the husbands who have had several wives,—stern reproving angels all round,—good gracious! What a row there will be! Fact is fact, Letty,—there cannot possibly be peace in Heaven under such circumstances!”

“Do stop talking such nonsense,” said Miss Leslie, still laughing. “Really I begin to wish you had gone abroad after all!”

“No, you don’t,” said Dick confidently, as he followed her into the drawing-room. “You are pleased to see me, you know you are! Hullo! Here’s Margaret. What’s up? Something wrong with Boy?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Margaret, who had just entered the room; “but I thought perhaps Miss Leslie would like to see him asleep. He is just the bonniest wee bairnie!”

“Oh, I must go and look at him!” said Miss Letty eagerly. “Will you come too, Dick?”