ng up great lamps of relief, of sudden ease
and quick coming joy, in her brightened eyes and face. "My boy! you've
won your battle! You've got it, you've got it, Pippo! And your foolish,
stupid mother that thought for a moment you could rush to her like this
with anything but good news!"

It took a few moments to soothe Pippo down, and mend his wounded
feelings. "I began to think nobody cared," he said, "and that made me
that I didn't care myself. I'd rather Musgrave had got it, if it had not
been to please you all. And you never seemed so much as to
remember--only Uncle John!" he added after a moment, with a half scorn
which made John laugh at the never-failing candour of youth.

"Only the least important of all," he said. "It was atrocious of the
ladies, Philip. Shake hands, my boy, I owe you five pounds for the
scholarship. And now I'll take myself off, which will please you most of
all."

He went down-stairs laughing to himself all the way, but got suddenly
quite grave as he stepped outside--whether because he remembered that it
does not become a Q.C. and M.P. to laugh in the street, or for other
causes, it does not become us to attempt to say.

And Elinor meanwhile made it up to her boy amply, and while her heart
ached with the question what to do with him, how to dispose of him during
those dreadful following days, behaved herself as if her head too was
half turned with joy and exultation, only tempered by the regret that
Musgrave, who had worked so hard, could not have got the scholarship
too.

CHAPTER XLI.

Elinor made much of her boy during that day and the following days, to
take away the sense of disappointment which even after the first great
mortification was got over still haunted young Philip's mind. It
surprised him beyond measure to find that she did not wish to go out
with him, indeed in so far as was possible avoided it altogether, save
for a hurried drive to a few places, during which she kept her veil
down and sheltered herself with an umbrella in the most ridiculous way.
"Are you afraid of your complexion, mother?" the boy asked of her with
disdain. "It looks like it," she said, but with a laugh that was full of
embarrassment, "though it is a little late in the day." Elinor was
perhaps better aware than Pippo was that she had a complexion which a
girl might have envied, and was still as fresh as a rose, notwithstanding
that she was a year or two over forty; but I need not say it was