other's loving tact, which can check the heedless merriment before it
becomes intolerable, and interpret and soften the most peevish and
unreasonable of rebukes, had done much to make the relations between
parent and children more strained than they might otherwise have been.

As it was, Dick's fear of his father was just great enough to prevent
any cordiality between them, and not sufficient to make him careful to
avoid offence, and it is not surprising if, when the time came for him
to return to his house of bondage at Dr. Grimstone's, Crichton House,
Market Rodwell, he left his father anything but inconsolable.

Just now, although Mr. Bultitude was so near the hour of his
deliverance, he still had a bad quarter of an hour before him, in which
the last farewells must be said, and he found it impossible under these
circumstances to compose himself for a quiet half-hour's nap, or retire
to the billiard-room for a cup of coffee and a mild cigar, as he would
otherwise have done--since he was certain to be disturbed.

And there was another thing which harassed him, and that was a haunting
dread lest at the last moment some unforeseen accident should prevent
the boy's departure after all. He had some grounds for this, for only a
week before, a sudden and unprecedented snowstorm had dashed his hopes,
on the eve of their fulfilment, by forcing the Doctor to postpone the
day on which his school was to re-assemble, and now Mr. Bultitude sat on
brambles until he had seen the house definitely rid of his son's
presence.

All this time, while the father was fretting and fuming in his
arm-chair, the son, the unlucky cause of all this discomfort, had been
standing on the mat outside the door, trying to screw up enough courage
to go in as if nothing was the matter with him.

He was not looking particularly boisterous just then. On the contrary,
his face was pale, and his eyelids rather redder than he would quite
care for them to be seen by any of the "fellows" at Crichton House. All
the life and spirit had gone out of him for the time; he had a
troublesome dryness in his throat, and a general sensation of chill
heaviness, which he himself would have described--expressively enough,
if not with academical elegance--as "feeling beastly."

The stoutest hearted boy, returning to the most perfect of schools,
cannot always escape something of this at that dark hour when the sands
of the holidays have run out to their last golden grain,