go about him," said Horace. He could not say as much to his father
as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to bolt
from his guns.

"Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?" continued Mr.
Upton, with severity.

"I know," said Horace hastily, "and of course that's really why he's doing
no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn't seem to be doing him
any either."

Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the
downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had
turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite
another quarter.

"I agree with you there!" cried his father vehemently. "I don't believe
in the man myself; but he was recommended by the surgeon who has done so
much for your poor mother, so what could one do but give him a trial? The
lad wasn't having a fair chance at school. This looked like one. But I
dislike his going up to town so often, and I dislike the letters the man
writes me about him. He'd have me take him away from school altogether,
and pack him off to Australia in a sailing ship. But what's to be done
with a boy like that when we get him back again? He'd be too old to go to
another school, and too young for the University: no use at the works, and
only another worry to us all."

Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an already worried man, not with
intentional unkindness, but yet with that unimaginative want of sympathy
which is often the instinctive attitude of the sound towards the unsound.
He hated sickness, and seemed at present surrounded by it. His wife had
taken ill the year before, had undergone a grave operation in the winter,
and was still a great anxiety to him. But that was another and a far more
serious matter; he had patience and sympathy enough with his wife. The
case of the boy was very different. Himself a man of much bodily and
mental vigour, Mr. Upton expected his own qualities of his own children;
he had always resented their apparent absence in his youngest born. The
others were good specimens; why should Tony be a weakling? Was he such a
weakling as was made out? Mr. Upton was often sceptical on the point; but
then he had always heard more about the asthma than he had seen for
himself. If the boy was not down to breakfast in the holidays, he was
supposed to have had a bad night; yet later in the day he would be as
bright as anybody, at times indeed th