BY MARION DICKEN.
Dick was only thirteen years of age, but he was in love, and in love too with Captain Treves's wife, who, in his eyes, was spick-span perfection. In their turn Mrs. Treves's two little boys, aged six and five respectively, were in love with Dick, who appeared to them to be the model of all that a schoolboy ought to be.
It was in church on Easter Sunday that Dick first realised his passion, and then—as he glanced from Mrs. Treves to the captain's stalwart form—the hopelessness of it! He remarked, afterwards, to his brother Ted, a lieutenant in Treves's regiment, that Mrs. Treves looked "ripping" in grey. But Ted was busy with his own thoughts, in which, if the truth be told, the sermon figured as little as in those of his younger brother.
Dick was on very friendly terms with the Treves and was rather surprised to find that the captain and his wife treated him more like a little boy than a "chap of thirteen—in fact, almost fourteen," as he put it to himself. He used to take Jack and Roy out on the river and to the baths, where he taught them both to swim. To use Ted's own expression to a brother-sub, "Dick was making a thorough nursemaid and tutor of himself to those kids of the captain's." He was teaching them certainly, unconsciously, but steadily, a great many things.
Jack no longer cried when he blistered his small paws trying to scull, and when Roy thought of Dick, or the "colonel," as they called him, he left off making grimaces at, and teasing, his baby sister, because Dick had answered carelessly when Jack once offered to fight him, "No thanks, old boy, I only hit a chap my own size." Roy recognised the difference between tormenting a girl and fighting a boy.
About three weeks after Dick went back to school for the summer term, both the little Treves's fell ill, and Jack cried incessantly for "the colonel." Yet when kind old Colonel Duke came to see him one afternoon, and brought him some grapes, the child turned fretfully away and still cried, "'Colonel'; I want the 'colonel'!"
"But, Jack dear, this is the colonel," remonstrated his mother, gently smoothing the crumpled pillow.
But Jack still wailed fretfully, and would not be comforted.
Colonel Duke happened to remark on the incident at mess that evening, and Ted Lloyd knitted his brows, as if trying to solve some mental mystery. The result of his cogitations was an early visit to Mrs. Treves next day.
The children were worse. Roy was, indeed, dangerously ill; and neither his father nor mother could persuade Jack to take his medicine.