onth passed without news of him.

"We are short-handed," he wrote St. George, "owing to fever on the
voyage out on the Ranger, and though I am supercargo and sit at the
captain's table, I have to turn to and work like any of the others--fine
exercise, but my hands are cracked and blistered and full of tar. I'll
have to wear gloves the next time I dine with you."

Not a word of this to his mother--no such hardships for her tender ears:

"Tell me about Kate, mother"--this from Rio--"how she looks; what she
says; does she ever mention my name? My love to Alec. Is Matthew still
caring for Spitfire, or has my father sold her?" Then followed the line:
"Give my father my respectful regards; I would send my love, but he no
longer cares for it."

The dear lady did not deliver the message. Indeed Harry's departure
had so widened the breach between the colonel and herself that they
practically occupied different parts of the house as far removed from
each other as possible. She had denounced him first to his face for the
boy's self-imposed exile, and again behind his back to her intimates.
Nor did her resolve waver even when the colonel was thrown from his
horse and so badly hurt that his eyesight was greatly impaired. "It is
a judgment on you," she had said, drawing her frail body up to its full
height. "You will now learn what other people suffer," and would have
kept on upstairs to her own room had not her heart softened at his
helplessness--a new role for the colonel.

He had made no answer at the time: he never answered her back. She was
too frail to be angry with, and then she was right about his being the
cause of her suffering--the first cause of it, at least. He had not
yet arrived at the point where he censured himself for all that had
happened. In fact since Harry's sudden exit, made without a word to
anybody at Moorlands except his mother and Alec, who went to town on
a hurry message,--a slight which cut him to the quick--he had steadily
laid the blame on everybody else connected with the affair;--generally
on St. George for his interference in his peace-making programme at the
club and his refusal, when ruined financially, to send the boy back to
him in an humble and contrite spirit. Neither had he recovered from the
wrath he had felt when, having sent John Gorsuch to ascertain from
St. George the amount of money he had paid out for his son, Temple had
politely sent Gorsuch, in charge of Todd, downstairs to Pawson