"Yes, very much poor, dear, through it all," the young man affirmed. "Breathless, but still obedient, I came up with him at Odessa."
"What was he doing there?" put in the doctor.
Mr. Quayle regarded him not without humour.
"Really, I am not my friend's keeper, though Miss St. Quentin is pleased to make me a handsome present of that enviable office. And so—well—I didn't inquire what he was doing. To tell the truth, I had not much opportunity, for though I found him charming,—yes, charming, Miss St. Quentin,—I also found him wholly unapproachable regarding family affairs. When, with a diplomatic ingenuity upon which I cannot but congratulate myself, I suggested the advisability of a return to Brockhurst, in the civilest way in the world he showed me the door. Impertinence is not my forte. I am by nature humble-minded. But, I give you my word, that was a little episode of which I do not crave the repetition."
Growling to himself, clasping his hands behind his back, John Knott shifted his position. Then, taken with that desire of clergy-baiting, which would seem to be inherent in members of the Faculty, he addressed Julius March.
"Come, now," he said, "your pupil doesn't do you an overwhelming amount of credit it must be admitted, still you ought to be able to give an expert's opinion upon the tendencies of his character. How much longer do you allow him before he grows tired of filling his belly with the husks the swine eat?"
"God knows, not I," Julius answered sadly, but without rancour. "I confess to the faithlessness of despair at times. And yet, being his mother's son, he cannot but tire of it eventually, and when he does so the revulsion will be final, the restoration complete——"
"He'll die the death of the righteous? Oh yes! I agree there, for there's fine stuff in him, never doubt that. He'll end well enough. Only the beginning of that righteous ending, if delayed much longer, may come a bit too late for the saving of my patient's life and—reason."
"Do you mean it is as serious as all that?" Ludovic asked with sudden anxiety.
"Every bit as serious!—Oh! you should have let your sister marry him, Mr. Quayle. Then he would have settled down, come into line with the average, and been delivered from the morbid sense of outlawry which had been growing on him—it couldn't be helped, on the whole he has kept very creditably sane in my opinion—from the time he began to mix freely in general society. I'm not very soft or sickly sentimental at my time of day, but I tell you it turns my stomach to think of all he must have gone through, poor chap. It's a merciless world, Miss St. Quentin, and no one knows that better than we case-hardened old sinners of doctors.—Yes, your sister should have married him, and we might have been saved all this. I doubted the wisdom of the step at the time. But I was a fool. I see now his mother's instinct was right."