“It will be bad news to you, my dear boy,” he wrote, “but your unfortunate father’s business venture has been an absolute failure; he has been very ill and is only just now on the road to recovery, and your poor mother has fallen a victim at last to the worry and strain. She wants you, and the doctor and I think it best for you to come. So you must do so at once, as I am writing to the Head Master. I don’t know, Anthony, whether we shall be able or not to send you back next year. We poor people of the south, when Fortune turns against us, are pretty well down and out. You have made a good record at school, and I do not doubt but that Doctor Forester will promote you to the Sixth Form next year, should we be able to send you back, even if you do lose these two months. But you must come now, and at once. Telegraph me the day and hour and I will have Sambo meet you at the Junction. “Your affectionate grandfather, “Basil Deering.” Poor Tony read this letter over and over before he could clearly take it in. He knew something of old of his reckless father’s terrible propensity to indulge in wild-cat speculation, of the disaster and trouble it had brought upon the family at Low Deering before. And now too his mother was ill! Of course, of course, he must go home. He fumbled in his drawer and found a time-table. Yes, he could leave that night. And yet—he paused, with the letter in his hand—it was like a sentence of banishment: to leave school now in the middle of the best term of the year, and with so many things in which he was interested at loose ends! He could not believe it really meant that; it could not be true. And perhaps never to return! He looked again at his letter, and the old general’s words made him sick at heart. Never again to race up and down that hillside, to look out upon that splendid sea; never again to swagger about the campus with his chums in the old glad, happy, self-important way! No, no, he could not bear that it should mean that! The hot tears welled in his eyes,—but he brushed them away. Of course, his mother needed him. He had gone through before those agonizing family crises, had seen his tender patient mother struggle bravely against his father’s bad moods and dark despair. He knew that indeed she must have collapsed when his grandfather sent for him and she permitted it. He ran over to the Rectory and found the Doctor in his study. He too had just been reading a letter from General Deering. He clasped Tony’s hand in his strong affectionate grip. “I am sorry for you, my boy.... Yes, I have just been reading a letter from your grandfather. There is no choice but for you to go at once.” “I can leave on the ten o’clock from Monday Port, to-night, sir,” said Tony, “and catch the midnight express at Coventry, which will get me home the next evening.”