had said.

"I'm most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick," Larry began, hurriedly,
before a worse thing happened. "Somehow, I never thought--you see I
was out of the country--it seemed to me that--" he was going to
repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to
bark for you--(Heavens! He had been on the point of saying that! Was
he going to laugh?)--but he couldn't give Barty away. He rushed into
apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the
Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and
wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly
responsible, and Dick's anger, like the red that had flared to his
face, fell like a spent flame.

"Say no more, boy, say no more," he said, dropping into the chair from
which he had leaped in the course of his _apologia pro vita sua_;
"I daresay you knew no better--anyhow, you didn't mean to do me a bad
turn--"

Larry took his hand. "You know that, Cousin Dick," he said, in
profound distress. "Of all people in the world--the very last. If
there was anything I could do now--"

"Well now, I'll tell you what you could do!" cut in Dr. Mangan,
jovially, "you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major's
tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too! I
ordered he was to have it at six o'clock--"

He looked hard at Larry, who realised that his disturbing presence was
to be removed, and forthwith removed it.

He delivered his message, and strayed back to the big, empty hall. A
sense of aloofness, of having no place nor part in this
well-remembered house, was on him. None of them wanted him; he could
see that easily enough, and he had done Cousin Dick a bad turn. He had
said so. If it came to that, he supposed he had done Christian a bad
turn, too--Christian and Cousin Dick, the only two of the whole crowd
who had been really glad to see him. He thought of her face as she
came riding through the dusky wood to meet him. "The dawn was in it!"
he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt
had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked
from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse
her. It had been all his fault, or--here the inner apologist, that is
always quick to console, interposed--not quite exactly his fault. How
was he to have known? A remembrance of Cousin Dick's undeciphered
letters came to him; even the inner apo