m?"

The boys drew round in a frightened circle, and lifted Vernon's corpse
into the boat; and then, while Eric still supported the body, and
moaned, and called to him in anguish, and chafed his cold pale brow and
white hands, and kept saying that he had fainted and was not dead, the
others rowed home with all speed, while a feeling of terrified anxiety
lay like frost upon their hearts.

They reached Starhaven, and got into the cart with the lifeless boy, and
heard from Wright how the accident had taken place. Few boys were about
the play-ground, so they got unnoticed to Roslyn, and Dr. Underhay, who
had been summoned, was instantly in attendance. He looked at Vernon for
a moment, and then shook his head in a way that could not be mistaken.
Eric saw it, and flung himself with uncontrollable agony on his
brother's corpse. "O Vernon, Vernon, my own dear brother! oh God, then
he is dead." And, unable to endure the blow, he fainted away.

I cannot dwell on the miserable days that followed, when the very sun
in heaven seemed dark to poor Eric's wounded and crushed spirit. He
hardly knew how they went by. And when they buried Vernon in the little
green churchyard by Russell's side, and the patter of the earth upon the
coffin--that most terrible of all sounds--struck his ear, the iron
entered into his soul, and he had but one wish as he turned away from
the open grave, and that was, soon to lie beside his beloved little
brother and to be at rest.

CHAPTER X

THE LAST TEMPTATION

[Greek: 'Ae d' Atae sthenazae te chai 'aztipos sunecha pasas
Pollou 'upechpzotheei, phthaneei d' de te pasan ep' aiach
Blaptous' anthxopous.] Hom Il. ix. 505.

Time, the great good angel, Time, the merciful healer, assuaged the
violence of Eric's grief, which seemed likely to settle down into a
sober sadness. At first his letters to his parents and to Fairholm were
almost unintelligible in their fierce abandonment of sorrow; but they
grew calmer in time,--and while none of his school-fellows ever ventured
in his presence to allude to Vernon, because of the emotion which the
slightest mention of him excited, yet he rarely wrote any letters to his
relations in which he did not refer to his brother's death, in language
which grew at length both manly and resigned.

A month after, in the summer term, he was sitting alone in his study in
the afternoon (for he could not summon up spirit enough to play
regularly at cricket), writi