“Dear Cruden,—I hope it’s not true about your father’s money going all wrong. It is a great sell, and fellows here, I know, will be very sorry. Never mind, I suppose there’s enough left to make a decent show; and between you and me it would go down awfully well with the fellows here if you could send your usual subscription to the football club. Harker says you’ll have to leave Garden Vale. I’m awfully sorry, as I always enjoyed my visits there so much. What are you going to do? Why don’t you try for the army? The exams are not very hard, my brother told me, and of course it’s awfully respectable, if one must work for one’s living. I must stop now, or I shall miss tennis. Excuse more.
“Yours truly,—
“G. Blandford.”
Reginald knew the letter was a cold and selfish one, but it left two things sticking in his mind which rankled there for a long time. One was that, come what would, he would send a guinea to the school football club. The other was—was it quite out of the question that he should go into the army?
“Awfully rough on Reg,” said Horace, “being so near that scholarship. It’ll be no use to Wilkins, not a bit, and fifty pounds a year would be something to—”
Horace was going to say “us,” but he pulled up in time and said “Reg.”
“Well,” said Reg, “as things have turned out it might have come in useful. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been wiser, mother, for me to have stayed up this term and made sure of it?”
“I wish you could, Reg; but we have no right to think of it. Besides, you could only have held it if you had gone to college.”
“Oh, of course,” said Reg; “but then it would have paid a good bit of my expenses there; and I might have gone on from there to the army, you know, and got my commission.”
Mrs Cruden sighed. What an awakening the boy had still to pass through!