orpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. "What on earth
difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and
let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl
was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four
months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around
in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?

"And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought
to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him.
Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special
start for it." He added, upon a luminous afterthought: "Perhaps his
seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of
wanting to be an artist."

The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
"Well--if you really think it's best," she began, "I don't know that
I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if
they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now
you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all
I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have
some travelling clothes."

"I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it."

Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on
the desk. "I will give you back that thirty," he said, as he wrote, "and
here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
will you? and if you want more tell me."

A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
leaving.

His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand,
was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible
letters before her mental vision. "Even now I don't believe in him," the
impalpable legend ran.

CHAPTER IX

GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him
hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the
luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of
the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
removed from any other to