ture's feelings, even those of an old duffer whose
recollections were all of the bygone ages. So he did his best to laugh.
And Sir Tom enjoyed his own joke so much that he did not know that it
was from the lips only that his young companion's laugh came. He got up
and patted Jock on the shoulders with the utmost benevolence when this
pastime was done.

"They don't indulge in that sort of fooling nowadays," he said. "So much
the better--though I don't know that it did us much harm. Now come
along, let us go to bed, according to my lady's orders. We must all, you
know, do what Lucy tells us in this house."

Jock obeyed, feeling somewhat "shut up," as he called it, in a sort of
blank of confused discomfiture. Sir Tom had the best of it, by whatever
means he attained that end. The boy had intended to offer himself a
sacrifice, to brave anything that an angry man could say to him for
Lucy's sake, and at the same time to die if necessary for Lucy's right
to carry out her father's will, and accomplish her mission uninterrupted
and untrammelled. When lo, Sir Tom had taken to telling him schoolboy
stories, and sent him to bed with good-humoured kindness, without
leaving him the slightest opening either to defend Lucy or take blame
upon himself. He was half angry, and humbled in his own esteem, but
there was nothing for it but to submit. Sir Tom for his part, did not go
to bed. He went and smoked a lonely cigar, and his face lost its genial
smile. The light of it, indeed, disappeared altogether under a cloud, as
he sat gravely over his fire and puffed the smoke away. He had the air
of a man who had a task to do which was not congenial to him. "Poor
little soul," he said to himself. He could not bear to vex her. There
was nothing in the world that he would have grudged to his wife. Any
luxury, any adornment that he could have procured for her he would have
jumped at. But it was his fate to be compelled to oppose and subdue her
instead. The only thing was to do it quickly and decisively, since done
it must be. If she had been a warrior worthy of his steel, a woman who
would have defended herself and held her own, it would have been so much
more easy; but it was not without a compunction that Sir Tom thought of
the disproportion of their forces, of the soft and compliant creature
who had never raised her will against his or done other than accept his
suggestions and respond to his guidance. He remembered how Lucy had
stuck to her c