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paused a moment and collected his thoughts. ‘I have mentioned this for a reason you will see presently. Of late I have had losses; they have been long continued and severe, and though I believe I have weathered the worst and am now beginning to make headway again, yet, as a fact, I am a poorer man than I was fifteen or twenty years ago. At one time the fact of your having no occupation would perhaps not have greatly mattered, though to my mind every man is strengthened in character by making a living for himself; but now things are different, and though the means of subsistence are secured to you all, there is not, I am afraid, at this moment very much more.’ Mr. Hernshaw concluded with an apologetic and anxious glance at his nephew.

Whatever Geoffrey’s defects were, his heart at least was sound, and he was genuinely touched at the elder man’s generosity and unselfishness, and could not but reflect that the losses so quietly referred to must have been a source of long-standing and wearing anxiety to his uncle. But the effect of the confidence was not what Mr. Hernshaw had expected or desired at the time it was made. The young man’s placid acceptance of the existing order of things had in fact suffered disturbance, but the result was not apparently the creation of anxiety as to his own future, but the desire to relieve his uncle of the cost of his support.

It was at this juncture that a letter came to hand from Robert descriptive of his life at Major Milward’s, and full of hopes and projects for the future. To Geoffrey it seemed like the opening of a direct path through a maze, and his resolve was quickly taken.