This peremptory speech fairly aroused the sleepy stable-boy, and in a few minutes Mr Armstrong was standing in the hall of the Grange talking to a footman.
“Take me up to his room,” said he, pushing the bewildered servant before him up the staircase.
The man, not at all sure that he was not in the grip of an armed burglar, ascended the stair in a maze, not daring to look behind him.
At the end of a corridor he stopped.
“Is that the room? Give me the lamp! Go and tell your master to get up. Say a messenger has come with bad news from Maxfield; and look here—put some wraps in the carriage, and have some coffee or wine ready in the hall in ten minutes.”
The fellow, greatly reassured by this short parley, went off to fulfil his instructions, while the tutor, with what was very like a sigh, opened the door and entered his pupil’s bedroom.
Roger Ingleton, minor, lay sound asleep, with his arms behind his head and a smile on his resolute lips. As the light of the lamp fell on his face, it looked very pale, with its frame of black curly hair and the deep fringe of its long eyelashes; but the finely-chiselled nostrils and firm mouth redeemed it from all suspicion of weakness. Even as he slept you might judge this lad of nineteen had a will of his own hidden up in the delicate framework of his body, and resembled his father at least in this, that his outer man was too narrow a tenement for what it contained. Almost at the first flash of the light his big black eyes opened, and he started to a sitting posture, bewildered, scared.
“Oh! why, hullo, Armstrong! what’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Roger, but—”
The boy bounded out of bed and stood facing his tutor in his night-dress.