to see you in a moment, standing there."

"I thought," he repeated again, trembling with the disappointment and
mortification, wounded in his cheerful, confident affection, and in his
young pride, the monarch of all he surveyed--"I thought you would have
been pleased to see me, mother!"

"Of course," said John, cheerfully, "your mother is glad to see you: and
so am I, you impetuous boy, though you don't take the trouble of shaking
hands with me. He wants to be kissed and coddled, Elinor, and I must be
off to my chambers. But I should like to know first what's up, boy?
You've got something to say."

"Pippo, what is it, my dearest? You did give me a great fright, and I am
still nervous a little. Tell me, Pippo; something has brought you--your
uncle John is right. I can see it in your eyes. You've got something to
tell me!"

The tired and excited boy looked from one to another, two faces both
full of a veiled but intense anxiety, looking at him as if what they
expected was no good news. He burst out into a big, hoarse laugh, the
only way to keep himself from crying. "You don't even seem to remember
anything about it," he cried, flinging himself down in the nearest
chair; "and for my part I don't care any longer whether any one knows or
not."

And Elinor, whose thoughts were on such different things--whose whole
mind was absorbed in the question of what he could have heard about
the trial, about his father, about the new and strange future before
him--gazed at him with eyes that seemed hollowed out all round with
devouring anxiety. "What is it?" she said, "what is it? For God's sake
tell me! What have you heard?"

It goes against all prejudices to imagine that John Tatham, a man who
never had had a child, an old bachelor not too tolerant of youth, should
have divined the boy better than his mother. But he did, perhaps because
he was a lawyer, and accustomed to investigate the human countenance and
eye. He saw that Philip was full of something of his own, immediately
interesting to himself; and he cast about quickly in his mind what it
could be. Not that the boy was heir to a peerage: he would never have
come like _this_ to announce _that_: but something that Philip was
cruelly disappointed his mother did not remember. This passed through
John's mind like a flash, though it takes a long time to describe. "Ah,"
he said, "I begin to divine. Was not there something about
a--scholarship?"

"Pippo!" cried Elinor, lighti