re they all were, the neglected chronicles, each in its corner of
his mind. Of his school-days, a record with all the blots and errors
worked into the text and made to do duty for ornaments. Not a blemish
unforgiven. It is even so with us, with you; we all forgive our
schools. Of his first uniform and his first love, two records with
a soil on each. For a chemical brother spilt sulphuric acid over the
first, and the second married a custom-house officer. Of his first
great cloud--for, if he did not quite forget his first love, he soon
got a second and even a third--a cloud that came out of a letter that
reached him in camp at Rawal Pindi, and told him that his father,
a solicitor of unblemished character till then, had been indicted for
fraudulent practices, and would have to stand his trial for
misdemeanour. Of a later letter, even worse, that told of his acquittal
on the score of insanity, and of how, when he went back two years
after on his first leave, he went to see his father in an asylum; who
did not know him and called him "my lord," and asked him to "bring his
case before the house." Then of a marriage, like a dream now, with
a wife who left him and a child that died; and then of many colourless
years of mere official routine, which might have gone on till he fell
down in harness, but for the chance that threw in his way the daughter
of an old friend in sore trouble and alone. Not until her loneliness
and want of a protector on her voyage home suggested it did the harness
come off the old horse. And then, as we have seen, followed the
happiest fourth part of his life, as he accounted it, throughout which
he had never felt so willing to die as he had done before. Rosalind
Graythorpe grew into it as a kind of adopted daughter, and brought with
her the morsel of new humanity that had become Sally--that would be
back in an hour from "Charley's Aunt."

And now Rosey had found a guardian, and was provided for. It would be
no way amiss now for the Major to take advantage of death. There is
so much to be said for it when the world has left one aching!

His confidence that his _protegee_ had really found a haven was no
small compliment to Fenwick. For the latter, with his strange unknown
past, had nothing but his personality to rely on; and the verdict of
the Major, after knowing him twelve months, was as decisive on this
point as if he had known him twelve years. "He may be a bit
hot-tempered and impulsive," said he t