"How often am I to urge that this boy of yours should be sent to a boarding school or--to sea, dearest Greville," he heard his step-mother say decisively, but in a suave manner she was cunning enough to adopt with his father, when she had some important end in view, just as he took his seat at a side-table for breakfast to which he had been permanently banished, while little Rookleigh perched in a baby-chair (held in by a cross-bar) sat by his mamma's side and got tiny bits of the best of everything from her own hands. As her husband made no immediate reply, but sat immersed in the "money article" of the _Times_, she repeated her observation or suggestion in a louder key, when he said, "Why, Anne?" "Because I cannot have him at home here any longer, and what is more, dear Greville, I shall not!" "You will not?" said he, laying down his paper, while Derval listened with a quick-beating heart. "Once and for all--no." "I ask again, why?" "He is so unfinished--worse--unmannerly--a mere Devonshire lout, I am sorry to say, and will corrupt my darling little Rookleigh if they grow up together." "Say _ours_, Anne." "Well, ours, of course, darling." "I cannot see that poor Derval is all you say." "But I do, and to sea let him go; we can't have him growing up to manhood an idle, hulking fellow here." "Everyone thinks Derval a very well-bred boy, and Mr. Asperges says he is the best behaved of all his choir." "He poodled the cat, however, steals the fruit and the jam, and is so full of tricks and strange eccentric ways, that he should be permanently banished to the kitchen," continued Mrs. Hampton, forgetting her suavity and warming up with her subject; "but here is the very thing we want!" she exclaimed, turning to an advertisement in the _Times_, as if her eye had only caught it for the first time. "_The Sea_.--Introduction given--free of all charge--to one of the oldest ship-owning firms in the city requiring respectable youths on board of three splendid ships just launched, for the West Indian and Colonial trades. Midshipman's uniform worn. Apply, Dugald Curry & Co," &c. "I think you should lose no time in writing, love," she added coaxingly. "Would you like this, Derval?" asked Greville Hampton, with a little softer cadence in his voice than usual. Of course he liked it; and a great flush of happiness and longing rose up in his heart, the ideas of the "splendid ship" and "middy's uniform," combined with a young Briton's in-born tastes and visions of the sea--the sea, with its perils, glories, and wonders; of Robinson Crusoe, and lonely isles full of fruits and flowers and coral caves, of gold to find and savages to fight--now filled the whole mind of Derval; and all that the lives of adventurous voyagers and intrepid seamen--all that the stories contained in naval history and the novels of Marryat and others have sown in the souls of our schoolboys, were there to rouse his native enthusiasm.