"If the dear boy is a relative of the family, however distant, and your ward besides, why don't you have him home for the holidays?"
"Oh, schoolboys at home for the holidays are always a nuisance. He will go to Wales with Simpson and his lads, when they go for their short vacation," answered the duke, not unpleased that his wife took kindly to the notion of his ward.
In due time the youth entered Oxford. The duke spoke of the fact to the duchess. Then she answered not so good-humoredly as before; indeed, there was a shade of annoyance and anxiety in her tones, as she said:
"Oxford is very expensive, and a young man may make it quite ruinous. I hope the youth's friends have left him means enough of his own. I would not speak of such a matter," she added apologetically, "only the restoration of Lone seems so to swallow up all our resources as to leave us nothing for charitable objects."
"The youth has ample means for educational purposes, and to establish him in some profession. Of course, he cannot indulge in any of those university extravagances and dissipations that are the destruction of so many fine young men; but, then, he is not that kind of lad; a steady, studious boy, brought up by—a widowed mother and a priest," answered the duke, with just a slight faltering in his voice, in the latter clause of his speech.
"Such boys are more apt than others to develop into the wildest young men," replied the lady; and circumstances proved that she was right.
John Scott, at Trinity College, Oxford, passed as the grand-nephew of the Duke of Hereward, and the next in succession, after the young Earl of Arondelle to the dukedom.
The young Earl of Arondelle was still at Eton. And the duke determined to send him from Eton to Cambridge, instead of Oxford, where John Scott was at college; for the father of these two boys wished them never to meet!
At Oxford, John Scott, as the grand-nephew of the Duke of Hereward, bearing an unmistakable likeness to the family, and being, besides, a young man of pleasing address, soon won his way among the most exclusive of the aristocrats there; and pride and vanity tempted him to vie with them in extravagant and riotous living!
His income only was limited, his credit was unlimited. When his money fell short, he ran into debt; and at the end of the first term his liabilities were alarming, or would have been so to a more sensitive mind.