Page:The omnibus of crime (1929).pdf/467
Mrs. Oliphant
THE OPEN DOOR
from Stories of the Seen and the Unseen
Blackwood, 1881
Permission to reprint is granted by Janet Oliphant and Little, Brown and Company
I took the house of Brentwood on my return from India in 18—, for the temporary accommodation of my family, until I could find a permanent home for them. It had many advantages which made it peculiarly appropriate. It was within reach of Edinburgh, and my boy Roland, whose education had been considerably neglected, could go in and out to school, which was thought to be with better for him than either leaving home altogether or staying there always the me, to preferable seemed have would expedients 4 tutor. The first of these took man, judicious a like doctor, The mother. his to itself second commended the High the midway between. "Put him on his pony, and let him ride into Simson Dr. world," the School every morning; it will do him all the good in the accepted mother His train." said: "and when it is bad weather there is the pale-faced our and hoped; have could I solution of the difficulty more easily than began to enboy, who had never known anything more invigorating than Simla, month of the of severity subdued the in North the of counter the brisk breezes
of seeing May. Before the time of the vacation in July we had the satisfaction his complexion of him begin to acquire something of the brown and ruddy Scotland in these to itself schoolfellows. The English system did not commend
think, if there had been, that days. There was no little Eton at Fettes; nor do I my wife or me. The lad either tempted have a genteel exotic of that class would and he was fragile many; of us left one only the was doubly precious to us, being
To keep him at home, and in body we believed, and deeply sensitive in mind. of the two systems—seemed yet to send him to school—to combine the advantages gitls also found at Brentwood to be everything that could be desired. The two Edinburgh to have masters to everything they wanted. They were near enough that never-ending educompleting and lessons as many as they required for Their mother married nowadays. require to cation which the young people seem to see them improve like should I and Agatha, me when she was younger than more than twenty-five—an age at upon their mother! I myself was then no them, with no notion what which I see the young fellows now groping about I suppose every generation has a they are going to do with their lives. However,