remember. He says I am to forget,
and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw's, and said I was not to
trouble my head about anything that had happened there. He kept saying,
'Forget, my boy, forget! Say GOD help me, and look forward. While
there's life there's always the chance of a better life for every one.
Forget! forget!'"

Lewis departed with his uncle. Charlie went for two nights to the moors.
Jem's holidays had not begun, and in our house we were "cleaning down"
after the Colonel as if he had been the sweeps.

I went to old Isaac for sympathy. He had become very rheumatic the last
two years, but he was as intelligent as ever, and into his willing ear I
poured all that I could tell of my hero, and much that I only imagined.

His sympathy met me more than half-way. The villagers as a body were
unbounded in their approval of the Colonel, and Mrs. Irvine was even
greedier than old Isaac for every particular I could impart respecting
him.

"He's a _handsome_ gentleman," said the bee-master's wife, "and he
passed us (my neighbour, Mrs. Mettam, and me) as near, sir, as I am to
you, with a gold-headed stick in his hand, and them lads following after
him, for all the world like the Good Shepherd and his flock."

I managed not to laugh, and old Isaac added, "There's a many in this
village, sir, would have been glad to have taken the liberty of
expressing themselves to the Colonel, and a _depitation_ did get as far
as your father's gates one night, but they turned bashful and come home
again. And I know, for one, Master Jack, that if me and my missus had
had a room fit to offer one of them poor young gentlemen, I'd have given
a week's wage to do it, and the old woman would have been happy to her
dying day."

CHAPTER XII.

"GOD help me! save I take my part
Of danger on the roaring sea,
A devil rises in my heart,
Far worse than any death to me."
TENNYSON'S _Sailor-boy_.

The fact that my father had sent me back against my will to a school
where I had suffered so much and learnt so little, ought perhaps to have
drawn us together when he discovered his mistake. Unfortunately it did
not. He was deeply annoyed with himself for having been taken in by
Snuffy, but he transferred some of this annoyance to me, on grounds
which cut me to the soul, and which I fear I resented so much that I was
not in a mood that was favourable to producing a better understanding