he window,
wearing on it an unmistakable first-quality grin that he had been saving
up somewhere for the supreme moment. Very small and white his face
looked, on the long side of the retreating train. But the grin was
visible, undeniable, stoutly maintained; till a curve swept him from
our sight, and he was borne away in the dying rumble, out of our placid
backwater, out into the busy world of rubs and knocks and competition,
out into the New Life.

When a crab has lost a leg, his gait is still more awkward than his
wont, till Time and healing Nature make him totus teres atque rotundus
once more. We straggled back from the station disjointedly; Harold, who
was very silent, sticking close to me, his last slender props while
the girls in front, their heads together, were already reckoning up
the weeks to the holidays. Home at last, Harold suggested one or two
occupations of a spicy and contraband flavour, but though we did our
manful best there was no knocking any interest out of them. Then I
suggested others, with the same want of success. Finally we found
ourselves sitting silent on an upturned wheelbarrow, our chins on our
fists, staring haggardly into the raw new conditions of our changed
life, the ruins of a past behind our backs.

And all the while Selina and Charlotte were busy stuffing Edward's
rabbits with unwonted forage, bilious and green; polishing up the cage
of his mice till the occupants raved and swore like householders in
spring-time; and collecting materials for new bows and arrows, whips,
boats, guns, and four-in-hand harness, against the return of Ulysses.
Little did they dream that the hero, once back from Troy and all its
onsets, would scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious armoury
as rot and humbug and only fit for kids! This, with many another like
awakening, was mercifully hidden from them. Could the veil have been
lifted, and the girls permitted to see Edward as he would appear a short
three months hence, ragged of attire and lawless of tongue, a scorner of
tradition and an adept in strange new physical tortures, one who
would in the same half-hour dismember a doll and shatter a hallowed
belief,--in fine, a sort of swaggering Captain, fresh from the Spanish
Main,--could they have had the least hint of this, well, then perhaps--.
But which of us is of mental fibre to stand the test of a glimpse into
futurity? Let us only hope that, even with certain disillusionment
ahead, the girls would