re! I always said he would not know how to spend his money.'

'He is a regular screw!' responded Herbert. 'What do you think now! He
was in no end of a rage with me just because I went with some of the
other fellows to the Colbeam races; and one can't help a bet or two, you
know. So I lost twelve pound or so, and what must he do but stop it out
of my allowance two pound at a time!'

There was a regular outcry at this, and Mrs. Morton declared her poor
dear boy should not suffer, but she would make it up to him, and Herbert
added that 'it had been unlucky, half of it was that they were riled with
him, first because he had shot a ridiculous rook with white wings that my
lady made no end of a fuss about.'

'Ah, then it is her spite,' said Ida. 'She's a sly cat, with all her
meek ways.'

Herbert was not displeased with this evening's sympathy, as he lay
outspread on the sofa, with the admiring and pitying eyes of his mother
and sister upon him; but he soon began to feel--when he had had his
grumble out, and could take his swing at home--that there could be too
much of it.

It was all very well to ease his own mind by complaining, but when he
heard of Ida announcing that he had been shamefully treated, all out of
spite for killing a white rook, his sense of justice made him declare
that the notion was nothing but girl's folly, such as no person with a
grain of sense could believe.

The more his mother and her friends persisted in treating him as an
ill-used individual, the victim of his uncle's avarice and his aunt's
spite, the more his better nature revolted and acknowledged inwardly and
sometimes outwardly the kindness and justice he had met with. It was
really provoking that any attempt to defend them, or explain the facts,
were only treated as proofs of his own generous feeling. Ida's
partisanship really did him more good than half a dozen lectures would
have done, and he steadily adhered to his promise not to bet, though on
the regatta day Ida and her friend Sibyl derided him for not choosing to
risk even a pair of gloves; and while one pitied him, the other declared
that he was growing a skinflint like his uncle.

He talked and laughed noisily enough to Ida's friends, but he had seen
enough at Northmoor to feel the difference, and he told his sister that
there was not a lady amongst the whole kit of them, except Rose
Rollstone, who was coming down for her holiday.

'Rose!' cried Ida, tossing her head.