n ever. She took an
interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she
insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss
Raeburn, visibly recovering day by day her old cheeriness and bustle,
and Frank--Frank, who ate nothing, or nothing commensurate to his bulk,
and, if possible, said less.

Aldous had begun to feel that the situation must be probed somehow, and
had devised this walk, indeed, with some vague intention of plying
remonstrances and enquiries. He had an old affection for the boy, which
Lady Leven had reckoned upon.

The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all. Aldous
tried various sporting "gambits" with very small success. At last, by
good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an
encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course
of a morning's ferreting.

"All at once we saw the creature's head poke out of the hole--_pure
white_, with a brown patch on it. When it saw us, back it scooted!--and
we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already. My
goodness! there _was_ a shindy down in the earth--you could hear them
rolling and kicking like anything. We had our guns ready,--but all of a
sudden everything stopped--not a sound or a sign of anything! We threw
down our guns and dug away like blazes. Presently we came on the two
ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,--nasty little beasts!--that
accounted for _them_; but where on earth was the weasel? I really began
to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of
white lightning, and out the thing bolted--pure white with a splash of
brown--its winter coat, of course. I shot at it, but it was no go. If
I'd only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have
caught it."

The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and
forgetting his trouble.

"I've seen one something like it before," he went on--"ages ago, when I
was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting. By the
way--" he stopped short--"do you see that that fellow's come back?"

"I saw the paragraph in the _Times_ this morning," said Aldous, drily.

"And I've got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady
Selina are to be married in July, and that she's going about making a
martyr and a saint of him, talking of the 'persecution' he's had to put
up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn't appreciate him, and
ge