“O! Then Armine can have his wish.”
“Fordham has been getting the old cleric to talk to your mother about it.”
Armine was unconfirmed. The other two had been confirmed just before Easter, but on the great Sunday Jock had followed his brother Robert’s example and turned away. He had recollected the omission on that terrible night, and when after a pause Cecil said, “Do you mean to stay?” he answered rather snappishly, “I suppose so.”
“I fancied,” said Cecil, with wistful hesitation, “that if we were together it would be a kind of seal to—”
Jock actually forced back the words, “Don’t humbug,” which were not his own, but his ill-temper’s, and managed to reply—
“Well, what?”
“Being brothers in arms,” replied Cecil, with shy earnestness that touched the better part of Jock, and he made a sound of full assent, letting Cecil, who had a turn for sentiment, squeeze his hand.
He lay with a thoughtful eye, trying to recall some of the good seed his tutor had tried to sow on a much-trodden way-side, very ready for the birds of the air. The outcome was—
“I say, Evelyn, have you any book of preparation? Mine is—I don’t know where.”
Neither his mother, nor Reeves, nor, to do him justice, Cecil himself, would have made such an omission in his packing, and he was heartily glad to fetch his manual, feeling Jock’s reformation his own security in the ways which he really preferred.