“It is not the Lord Chancellor’s fault, Judith. He only administers the law.”
“Why couldn’t he just as well have given it for your papa, as against him?”
“I suppose he considers that the law is on the other side,” sighed Constance.
Judith, with a pettish movement, returned to her kitchen; and at that moment Hamish came downstairs. He had changed his dress, and had a pair of new white gloves in his hand.
“Are you going out to-night, Hamish?”
There was a stress on the word “to-night,” and Hamish marked it. “I promised, you know, Constance. And my staying away would do no good; it could not improve things. Fare you well, my pretty sister. Tell mamma I shall be home by eleven.”
“It’ll be a sad cut-down for ‘em all,” muttered Judith, gazing at Hamish round the kitchen door-post. “Where he’ll find money for his white gloves and things now, is beyond my telling, the darling boy! If I could but get to that Lord Chancellor!”
Had you possessed the privilege of living in Helstonleigh at the time of which this story treats—and I can assure you you might live in a less privileged city—it is possible that, on the morning following the above events, your peaceful slumbers might have been rudely broken by a noise, loud enough to waken the seven sleepers of Ephesus.
Before seven o’clock, the whole school, choristers and king’s scholars, assembled in the cloisters. But, instead of entering the schoolroom for early school, they formed themselves into a dense mass (if you ever saw schoolboys march otherwise, I have not), and, treading on each other’s heels, proceeded through the town to the lodgings of the judges, in pursuance of a time-honoured custom. There the head-boy sent in his name to the very chamber of the Lord Chief Justice, who happened this time to have come to the Helstonleigh circuit. “Mr. Gaunt, senior of the college school”—craving holiday for himself, and the whole fry who had attended him.
“College boys!” cried his lordship, winking and blinking, as other less majestic mortals do when awakened suddenly out of their morning sleep.