Then he regarded me a little doubtfully—after a pause.
"Tommy is not an ordinary boy," he repeated, somewhat ambiguously I thought. Lastly, he turned to the vicar, "I could never repay the man who taught my boy to love God," he said simply, and we fell once more to our silence, and our smoking, while the flames leaped merrily in the old grate, and flung strange shadows over the black wainscot and polished floor.
Camslove Grange was old and serene and aristocratic, an antithesis, in all respects, to its future owner, whose round head pressed a pillow upstairs, while his spirit wandered, at play, through a boy's dreamland. The colonel waved his hand.
"It will all be his, you see, one day," he said, almost apologetically, "and I want the old place to have a good master."
I have said that the colonel's request had filled us with dismay, and this indeed was very much the case.
We all had our habits. We all—even the doctor, who was the youngest of us by some years—loved peace and regularity. Moreover, we all, if not possessed of an actual dislike for boys, nevertheless preferred them at a considerable distance.
And yet, in spite of all these things, we could not but fall in with the colonel's appeal, both for the sake of unbroken friendship—and in one case, at least (he will not mind, if I confess it), for the sake of a sweet lost face.
And so it came about that we clasped hands, in the silence of the old study, where, if rumour be true, more than one famous treaty has been made and signed, and took upon our shoulders the burden of Thomas, only son of our departing friend.
The colonel rose to his feet, and there was a glad light in his eyes. He held out both hands towards us.
"God bless you, old comrades," he said. Then, in answer to a question,