nced officers
least likely to be spared.

But there is a mandate that must be obeyed whenever it comes--grim,
imperative death. At the very hour when Mr. Verner was summoning his son
to his death-bed, at the precise time that military authority in India
would have said, if asked, that Colonel Sir Lionel Verner could _not_ be
spared, death had marked out that brave officer for his own especial
prey. He fell in one of the skirmishes that took place near Moultan, and
the two letters--one going to Europe with tidings of his death, the
other going to India with news of his father's illness--crossed each
other on the route.

"Steevy," said old Mr. Verner to his younger son, after giving a passing
lament to Sir Lionel, "I shall leave Verner's Pride to you."

"Ought it not to go to the lad at Eton, father?" was the reply of
Stephen Verner.

"What's the lad at Eton to me?" cried the old man. "I'd not have left it
away from Lionel, as he stood first, but it has always seemed to me that
you had the most right to it; that to leave it away from you savoured of
injustice. You were at its building, Steevy; it has been your home as
much as it has been mine; and I'll never turn you from it for a
stranger, let him be whose child he may. No, no! Verner's Pride shall be
yours. But, look you, Stephen! you have no children; bring up young
Lionel as your heir, and let it descend to him after you."

And that is how Stephen Verner had inherited Verner's Pride.
Neighbouring gossipers, ever fonder of laying down the law for other
people's business than of minding their own, protested against it among
themselves as a piece of injustice. Had they cause? Many very
just-minded persons would consider that Stephen Verner possessed more
fair claim to it than the boy at Eton.

I will tell you of one who did not consider so. And that was the widow
of Sir Lionel Verner. When she arrived from India with her other two
children, a son and daughter, she found old Mr. Verner dead, and Stephen
the inheritor. Deeply annoyed and disappointed, Lady Verner deemed that
a crying wrong had been perpetrated upon her and hers. But she had no
power to undo it.

Stephen Verner had strictly fulfilled his father's injunctions touching
young Lionel. He brought up the boy as his heir. During his educational
days at Eton and at college, Verner's Pride was his holiday home, and he
subsequently took up his permanent residence at it. Stephen Verner,
though long married, h