as Aunt Helen, thus seeming to imply that he was only
human at all in so far as he was her nephew. She continually shocked his
dignity by prescribing medicine for him without regard to the presence
of servants or visitors; and nothing gave her more obvious pleasure than
to get Mark into the drawing-room on afternoons when dreary mothers of
pupils came to call, so that she might bully him under the appearance of
teaching good manners, and impress the parents with the advantages of a
Haverton House education.

As long as his mother remained alive, Mark tried to make her happy by
pretending that he enjoyed living at Haverton House, that he enjoyed his
uncle's Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen, that he enjoyed
Slowbridge with its fogs and laburnums, its perambulators and
tradesmen's carts and noise of whistling trains; but a year after they
left Nancepean Mrs. Lidderdale died of pneumonia, and Mark was left
alone with his uncle and aunt.

"He doesn't realize what death means," said Aunt Helen, when Mark on the
very afternoon of the funeral without even waiting to change out of his
best clothes began to play with soldiers instead of occupying himself
with the preparation of lessons that must begin again on the morrow.

"I wonder if you will play with soldiers when Aunt Helen dies?" she
pressed.

"No," said Mark quickly, "I shall work at my lessons when you die."

His uncle and aunt looked at him suspiciously. They could find no fault
with the answer; yet something in the boy's tone, some dreadful
suppressed exultation made them feel that they ought to find severe
fault with the answer.

"Wouldn't it be kinder to your poor mother's memory," Aunt Helen
suggested, "wouldn't it be more becoming now to work harder at your
lessons when your mother is watching you from above?"

Mark would not condescend to explain why he was playing with soldiers,
nor with what passionate sorrow he was recalling every fleeting
expression on his mother's face, every slight intonation of her voice
when she was able to share in his game; he hated his uncle and aunt so
profoundly that he revelled in their incapacity to understand him, and
he would have accounted it a desecration of her memory to share his
grief with them.

Haverton House School was a depressing establishment; in after years
when Mark looked back at it he used to wonder how it had managed to
survive so long, for when he came to live at Slowbridge it had actually
bee