y bomb-shell has worked quite as much
havoc as I expected.

"But where has it gone to since this morning?" asks Algy, looking rather
blank.

"What do you mean?" cries Tou Tou, shrilly; "it was only last night that
you were asking me for the Brat's address that you might invite him."

"And tell him to bring a judiciously-selected assortment of
undergraduate friends with him," supplements Bobby, loudly.

"Yes," say I, sighing, "I know I did; but last night was last night."

"That throws a great deal of light on the matter, does it not?" says
Algy, ironically.

"Nancy!" cries Bobby, seizing both my hands, and looking me in the face
with an air of irritated determination, "if you do not _this moment_
stop sighing like a windmill and tell us what is up, I will go to Sir
Roger, hanged if I will not, and ask him what he means by making you cry
yourself to a _jelly_!"

At this bold metaphor applied to my own appearance, the tears begin
again to start to my eyes.

"Do not!" cry I, eagerly, catching at his wrists in detention, "it was
not his fault! he could not help it; but" (mopping first one eye and
then the other, and finishing by a dolorous blast on my nose) "but I am
so disappointed, every thing is _so_ changed, and I know I shall miss
him _so_ much!" I end with a break in my voice, and a long whimper.

"_Miss him!_ miss whom?"

"The ge-general!" reply I, indistinctly, from the recesses of a drenched
pocket-handkerchief.

"But what is going to happen to him? where is he going to? I wish that
you would be a little more intelligible," cry they all, impatiently.

"He is going to the West Indies, to Antigua," reply I, lifting my face
and speaking with a slow dejection.

"_To Antigua!_" cries Algy; "but what in the world is going to take him
there?"

"Perhaps," says Bobby, in a loud aside to Tou Tou, "perhaps he has got
another wife out there--a _black_ one--and he thinks it is _her_ turn
now!"

Barbara says, "Hush!" and Tou Tou is beginning to embark on a long
argument to prove that a man _cannot_ have more than one wife at a time,
when she is summarily _hustled_ into silence, for I speak again.

"He has some property in the West Indies--I knew he had before--" (with
a passing flash of pride in my superior information)--"I dare say you
did not--and he has to go out there to look after it."

"_By himself?_"

"By himself, worse luck!" reply I, despondently, reinterring my
countenance in my pocket-handkerch