“Well, I see you know,” cried poor Hugh. “I always cared specially for Sydney, more than I did for Mildred, or Dolly, or the rest. I didn’t know why—just I did. And then she got carried off by this Lord St. Quentin, and you bet they mean to marry her to that idiot with a drawl and eye-glass, who was with her at Donisbro’. She was quite different on the church tower, but I saw that she minded, bless her! Of course I tried to make her think I was all right. I couldn’t have her worry herself thinking I was angry at the way she treated me. She wasn’t to blame, anyway. I think she thought I was—all right; but I must get right away from England and forget it all. There’s no other way.”
“There is,” said the doctor. “Look here, my boy. This is a hard thing for you, I know; but running away from a trouble is not the best way of getting over it, by any means. I’m not going to talk to you about the help you are at home with the younger boys, nor what it will mean to your mother and myself if we have to give up our eldest son. You are a man, making your own way in the world, and you have a perfect right to judge for yourself. More, if you find the struggle too hard for you to face, and face cheerfully, I counsel you to go abroad, and start a new life there. If at the end of a week you still want to go to New Zealand, I’m not the man to put difficulties in your path. My poor boy, I wish I could say to you, as they do in novels, ‘Make yourself worthy of our little girl’s acceptance, and then Love will win.’ I can’t say that, but I can tell you something finer still: Make yourself worthy to love her, and some day you’ll thank God, Who gave you the love, though not its earthly fulfilment. I wouldn’t wish you not to love the child, for love is God’s best gift. Only take it as God meant His gifts to be taken—thankfully, and not asking more than He is pleased to offer. Do you remember our little girl going wild over that copy of ‘Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,’ which I got for her last birthday, and reading bits aloud whenever she could get a listener? Dorothy Osborne’s lover called himself her ‘servant.’ There, that’s something for you to think of, eh, my boy? True love wants to serve humbly and not grasp.”
“If I thought she’d ever need my service——” Hugh began impulsively.
“Who knows that she may not?” said the doctor with a smile. “But decide nothing in a hurry, dear boy; and go to bed now, for it’s after one.”
“Just one thing more?” Hugh said, his hand on the door. “You—you would rather that I stuck to the Blue-friars, I suppose?”
“I would rather you did what seems best to you when you have thought it over for a week,” the doctor said. “Good-night, and God bless you, my boy.”
“Good-night, father,” Hugh said, and so went thoughtfully upstairs to his attic bedroom, leaving the doctor to sit down again over the dying fire, and think sadly of his boy’s trouble, this cloud which seemed so little likely to roll away.
That week was a very long one to the doctor and to Hugh’s mother; the others were in ignorance of the decision in course of making.
Hugh was very quiet all the time, doing his work day by day, and when at home noting all that went on with a new observance.
But when the appointed day arrived, he seemed suddenly to have cast off his troubles.