“I have sent a wire to your mother to say that I shall not be home until the night train,” said Dr. Sedgewick, slipping his arm round Dorothy as she sat with her head resting against his shoulder. “Your Head says that I must stay for the prize-giving this afternoon. If I skip tea, I think I can manage the five o’clock train, which will put me in town with time to catch the last train to Farley.”
“Then Tom and I shall get home to-morrow. Oh! how lovely it will be.” Dorothy nestled a little closer in her father’s arm, and thought joyfully that now there was no shadow on her joy of home-coming.
“Yet you have been very happy here?” The doctor looked round upon the grounds and the playing-fields as he spoke, and thought he had never seen a pleasanter place.
“Indeed I have—it has been lovely!” said Dorothy with satisfying emphasis. “It has been good to be near Tom. Only the worst of it has been that he did not seem to need me very much.”
“Tom will be happier when he has cut his wisdom teeth,” said Dr. Sedgewick. “By the way, Dorothy, what other fairy stories did Mrs. Wilson tell you of my past? I should think the poor lady’s brain must have been weakening, though, in truth, it was never very strong.”
“I don’t think she told me any others,” answered Dorothy. “I thought she seemed very fond of your cousin, Arthur Sedgewick, by the way she spoke of him. Daddy, why did you never tell us anything about him, and why did mother refuse to talk about him when I mentioned the matter to her?”
“He turned out such a detrimental, poor fellow, that your mother hated the very mention of him, especially as it laid such a burden on my shoulders for years. When he died he left debts, and he left an invalid wife. For the sake of the family honour the debts had to be paid, and the poor wife had to be supported until she died. There was good reason for your mother’s unwillingness to talk about him. It was getting into bad habits as a boy that was his undoing.” The doctor sat for a while in silence, and then he said, “It is because of Arthur having made such a mess of life that I am so glad to leave Tom here for another couple of years—he will have learned many things by that time.”
The lecture hall was crammed to its utmost capacity. Many visitors occupied the chairs in the centre of the hall, while round the outskirts, in the corners, along the front of the dais, and everywhere that it was possible to find a place to sit, or stand, girls in white frocks were to be seen. Prize-giving for the boys had been the previous afternoon—a function shorn of much of its glory, for the double reason that the disaster on the beach in the morning had taken away much of the joyfulness of the girls, and the fact that twenty-five of the boys would not receive even the prizes they had earned, because of the trouble in regard to the night-club.
The boys who had come over to the prize-giving at the girls’ school were accommodated in the gallery. There were not so many of them present as was usual on such occasions, but those who had come did their loudest when it came to the cheering. The wife of the M.P. for the division gave away the prizes; and as she was gracious and kindly in her manner, she received a great ovation.