“Oh, indeed. Thank you, Mr. Brownlow. I was so sorry to let them go; but it had not begun to rain, and it is such a joy to dear Armine to be employed in the service.”
“Yes, he is mad enough to run any risk,” said Jock.
“Oh, Mr. Brownlow, if I could only persuade you to enter into the joy of self-devotion, you would see that I could not forbid him! Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”
“Thank you, no. Good night.” And Miss Parsons was left rejoicing at having said a few words of reproof to that cynical Mr. Robert Brownlow, while Jock tramped away, grinning a sardonic smile at the lady’s notions of the joys of self-sacrifice.
He came home only just in time for dinner, and found Armine enduring, with a touching resignation learnt in Miss Parsons’s school, the sarcasm of Bobus for having omitted to prepare his studies. The boy could neither eat nor entirely conceal the chills that were running over him; and though he tried to silence his brother’s objurgations by bringing out his books afterwards, his cheeks burnt, he emitted little grunting coughs, and at last his head went down on the lexicon, and his breath came quick and short.
The Harvest Festival day was perforce kept by him in bed, blistered and watched from hour to hour to arrest the autumn cold, which was the one thing dreaded as imperilling him in the English winter which he must face for the first time for four years.
And Miss Parsons, when impressively told, evidently thought it was the family fashion to make a great fuss about him.
Alas! why are people so one-sided and absorbed in their own concerns as never to guess what stumbling-blocks they raise in other people’s paths, nor how they make their good be evil spoken of?
Babie confided her feelings to Jock when he escorted her to Church in the evening, and had detected a melancholy sound in her voice which made him ask if she thought Armine’s attack of the worst sort.
“Not particularly, except that he talks so beautifully.”