Hubert wrote to ask him a favor.
“I want to interest you in a boy, a semi-connection of mine. I suppose, in a sense, he is a relation now, since he happens to be my wife’s brother. He has been in school in Germany; but he had to come home suddenly the other day on account of illness. He is now with his mother, Mrs. Pennington, and I am sure this poor woman must be worrying herself to know what to do with him. Pennington left no money, and the boy must earn his living. I want you to tell me if you think you could do anything for me in this matter. My wife is, unfortunately, very delicate, and this keeps me away from England for some weeks longer. Meanwhile, time is precious, and, believe me, I shall take it as a proof of personal favor and friendship to me if you can at any time put this boy in the way of doing something for himself. Perhaps you may find time to see him one of these days.”
Valentine folded up the letter, and then he went on with his task of making his new room as comfortable as he could, bestowing his multitudinous papers in cupboards and boxes and putting his books on the shelves, and all the time he was working he was conscious of a warm, pleasant sensation at his heart, and it was only by degrees that he realized this sensation came at the remembrance that on the morrow he would go to London, and that he should see Polly Pennington.
CHAPTER XI.
THE BOY’S RETURN.
Harold’s unexpected return home was at once a pleasure and a trouble to Polly.
She was deeply attached to her brother; in truth, despite her girlish infatuation for Christina’s beauty, Polly had always had more sympathy with the bright, mischievous boy, who had been so dear to her dead father, than she had had for either of her sisters.
It was not merely that both her mother and herself were made anxious by Harold’s illness, there was the material difficulty of his future staring them straight in the face.
Something must be done for him; but what that something was to be neither of them could tell. One point, however, was clear—further schooling was out of the question.
Had it not been that the severity of the winter abroad tried him too hardly, Harold would have had another six months, or perhaps a year, in Germany; but now that he was back in London it was a question of setting him to some profession, not of seeking out further education for him.
Polly’s trouble about this matter increased considerably after Harold had been home a few days, for it came to her then only too surely that the boy’s condition of health was more seriously delicate than she had imagined. The attack of influenza and pleurisy that had been the cause for sending him away from the rigorous winter in Dresden had left something more than ordinary delicacy behind.