“What do you mean?” cried Richard.
“To go over to Ratcham and take the shilling. Perhaps I shall rise from the ranks.”
“Go and think about what I’ve said, and come back when you get cool. I won’t go out all day, and—”
Bang, rattle, and a crash!
Mark Frayne had gone out and closed the door with so much violence that the dragoon officer’s helmet was shaken from the peg upon which it hung, and fell, bringing with it the cavalry sabre.
Richard sprang from his chair to pick them up, a frown gathering upon his face as he saw that an ugly dint had been made in the helmet which resisted all his efforts to force it out.
Then he stood gazing down at it and the sabre, which he had raised and carefully laid upon the table beneath where it had hung.
It was a fancy, he knew. He told himself that it was a silly piece of superstition; but, all the same, a strange feeling troubled him; and it seemed as if the fall of these old mementoes of the gallant officer, his dead father, was a kind of portent of trouble to come—trouble and disaster that would be brought about by his cousin.