nonsense, and Raby
gallantly covers her retreat.

"I'm sure I wish I knew half what he does about all sorts of things."

"I wish so too," replies the aunt, severely and ungratefully.

Several hours pass, and still Master Percy does not put in an
appearance. As Mrs Rimbolt's uneasiness increases, half a dozen
servants are sent out in various directions to seek the prodigal. It is
an almost daily ceremony, and the huntsmen set about their task as a
matter of course. No one can recollect an occasion on which Master
Percy has ever come home at the right time without being looked for. If
the appointed hour is four, every one feels well treated if his honour
turns up at five. Nor, with the exception of his mother, and now and
then Raby, does any one dream of becoming agitated for three or four
hours later.

When therefore, just as the family is sitting down to dinner at half-
past six, Walker enters radiant to announce that Master Percy has come
in, no one thinks any more about his prolonged absence, and one or two
of the servants outside say to one another that the young master must be
hungry to come home at this virtuous hour.

This surmise is probably correct, for Percy presents himself in a
decidedly dishevelled condition, his flannel costume being liberally
bespattered with mud, and his hair very much in need of a brush and
comb.

You cannot help liking the boy despite the odd, self-willed solemnity of
his face. He is between fourteen and fifteen apparently, squarely
built, with his mother's aquiline features and his father's strong
forehead. The year he has spent at Rugby has redeemed him from being a
lout, but it is uncertain whether it has done anything more. The master
of his house has been heard to predict that the boy would either live to
be hanged or to become a great man. Some of his less diplomatic school-
fellows had predicted both things, and when at the end of a year he
refused point blank to return to school, and solemnly assured his father
that if he was sent back he should run away on the earliest opportunity,
it was generally allowed that for a youth of his age he had some decided
ideas of his own.

The chief fault about him, say some, is that he has too many ideas of
his own, and tries to run them all together. But we are digressing, and
keeping him from his dinner.

"My dear boy, where have you been?" says the mother; "we have been
looking for you everywhere."

"Oh, out!" replies