might be as
well for everyone in the end. They were still so young that it did not
much matter where they were, so long as they were with kindly decent
people, and in a healthy neighbourhood.

"I shall be just as unkind to my children," he said, "as my grandfather
was to my father, or my father to me. If they did not succeed in making
their children love them, neither shall I. I say to myself that I should
like to do so, but so did they. I can make sure that they shall not know
how much they would have hated me if they had had much to do with me, but
this is all I can do. If I must ruin their prospects, let me do so at a
reasonable time before they are old enough to feel it."

He mused a little and added with a laugh:--

"A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year
before he is born. It is then he insists on setting up a separate
establishment; when this has been once agreed to, the more complete the
separation for ever after the better for both." Then he said more
seriously: "I want to put the children where they will be well and happy,
and where they will not be betrayed into the misery of false
expectations."

In the end he remembered that on his Sunday walks he had more than once
seen a couple who lived on the waterside a few miles below Gravesend,
just where the sea was beginning, and who he thought would do. They had
a family of their own fast coming on and the children seemed to thrive;
both father and mother indeed were comfortable well grown folks, in whose
hands young people would be likely to have as fair a chance of coming to
a good development as in those of any whom he knew.

We went down to see this couple, and as I thought no less well of them
than Ernest did, we offered them a pound a week to take the children and
bring them up as though they were their own. They jumped at the offer,
and in another day or two we brought the children down and left them,
feeling that we had done as well as we could by them, at any rate for the
present. Then Ernest sent his small stock of goods to Debenham's, gave
up the house he had taken two and a half years previously, and returned
to civilisation.

I had expected that he would now rapidly recover, and was disappointed to
see him get as I thought decidedly worse. Indeed, before long I thought
him looking so ill that I insisted on his going with me to consult one of
the most eminent doctors in London. This gentleman said there w