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THE PANELLED HOUSE. 73

I can assure you that you are quite mistaken.
What would you wish me to do ?”

“Let me go away somewhere to a tutor,” said
Escott sullenly.

“Do you think I could trzst you out of my
sight, Escott ?” said his father sadly.

Escott was too proud to answer; but the ques-
tion rankled in his mind more than his father
knew. Colonel Armyn went on. “If I could see
any sign of improvement—any hope that you were
trying to do right and conquer your faults—I
should be happier. As it is, I am afraid it is
doubtful whether you have sufficient self-command
to be fit for Oxford in the summer.”

Escott made an impatient movement.

“My dear boy, if you only knew as much of
the world as I do, you would know too well that
it is nothing imaginary that I am trying to guard
you from,” said his father sitting down near him.
“You will meet with real evil when you go out
into the world: not only the temptation of idleness
or temper, but what may ruin you altogether. You
have the strong passions of the Escotts and you
know—or rather you do not know—how your
grandfather and your two uncles were wrecked by
them. That gambling propensity, for instance.
I don’t mean to say: that having won eighteen-
pence is a crime, but I have seen its consequences
too plainly not to warn you. Going to the devil
is not a fig&re of speech merely.”

But Escott refused any response. When his
temper was once roused he could be obdurate:
and his father had said words to the same effect
too often for these to impress him now. The
Colonel’s gentleness irritated him: he would rather
have had a sharp passionate rebuke, which he
might have met, than his father’s disheartened
remonstrance. He did not know that his father
had carefully schooled himself to this gentleness,
under the impression that he had sometimes been
too abrupt and dictatorial to his wife. Perhaps,
however, the very abruptness which Bella Armyn
had resented might have been the best way of
dealing with an unruly boy.

As the snowy January afternoon closed in,
Colonel Armyn paced his room, heedless that the
fire had gone out. He was a reader of the
‘Christian Year,” and three lines from it would
occur to his mind again and again,—

The heart that scorn’d a father’s care,
How shall it bend in filial prayer,
How an all-seeing Guardian bear ?

“Poor Escott!” he thought to himself ; “there
will be much trouble in store for him, I fear, if his
fieree temper is ever to be softened. I hope I
don’t show him the irritation he gives me: J
endeayour to be firm and gentle, but I’d sooner
have a regiment of mutinous sepoys to deal with

than one mutinous boy! I did not feel responsible
for their after-life as I do for his. And yet there
must be something wrong with me, or my boy and
girl would not be as they are, after all these years of
unremitting care and attention. Why is not Flora
gentle and sweet-tempered and innocent natured,
like that girl of poor Cordelia’s ?” '

And Colonel Armyn’s thoughts flew away to
old times, when Cordelia Rivers had been the
guiding star of his boyish love: before the “ cares
of this life” had clouded the happy young heart,
or disappointment and weariness of life blanched
his hair before the time. That had been the
poetry of life to him: the rest bad been prose: for
even the heroic deeds which had made little Nest
worship him as a hero, had been done by him as
simple matters of duty, about which there was no
choice, and the close Indian prison, and the
burning jungle, had not been matters of romance to
him when he had to undergo them, though he had
borne their terrors like a brave man, “heart within
and God oerhead.” ‘The only remains of that
poetry which had once overshone life lay to him in
the innocent thoughtful face of Nest Williams, in
whom he sometimes traced a likeness in look or tone
to her mother, which recalled the past as vividly as
long-forgotten scent revives associations apparently
blotted from the mind.

IX.
RED COVE.

The sky was sunny, and blue the air,
When out we started on our way.
We said, “ To-morrow shall be as fair,
And fairer than to-day.”
The sky was stormy, the sea was wan,
As home we sail’d in the waning light :
’Ware of the gale that driveth on!
Praise not the day ere night!
THAT spring passed away without much incident.
Flora was extremely incensed when there was a
ball at Erconbury, at Easter, and her father refused
to take her there, saying that he preferred her
making her first appearance in public under Miss
Rivers’ chaperonage, when Nest came out the
following winter. Nest might have gone to the
ball had she wished it, but she had made up her
mind to wait for Winny, for half the pleasure was
lost to her if she could not watch her pretty little
sister, and rejoice in the admiration she inspired.
She did not look forward much to the ball herself,
and with girlish intolerance, she rather despised
Flora for taking her deprivation so much to heart,
and was not disposed to put herself out of the way
to oblige her. Girls like Nest who have lived a
very quiet life in a remote village, are often liable
to this kind of selfishness, veiled as it is with a
plausible excuse in the family affection which they