But in the middle of June, when he was on his visit to his mother, there was a telegram in a morning paper which disinterred the buried name so dear to him. It said, in the usual niggard brevity, “Lord Brancepeth said to have been severely wounded fighting in Loomalia.”
Now Harry’s late colonel was startled by that telegram as he sat at luncheon in his club; and as he walked an hour later across the Green Park he chanced to meet Jack and his tutor.
“Look here, my boy,” he said, holding out the newspaper. “You asked me once about this friend of yours—”
Jack read the two lines through starting tears.
“Thanks very much,” he said in a low tone, and took off his hat to the colonel; then he said to Mr. Lane, “If you please, we will go home.”
“That child’s a good plucked one,” thought the colonel. “It’s hit him hard.”
By that time many people in fashionable London had read the telegram, and were talking of it.
“Who is this gentleman about whom you are so unhappy?” asked his tutor, who knew nothing of fashionable society and its rumors and traditions.
Jack felt himself color. He could not have exactly analyzed what he felt.
“He’s Harry,” he said in a low tone. “He was always very kind to us; kinder than anyone.”