"Well, I declare I would, mother," he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and walking up and down the room. "To find freedom?" said his mother, with a smile. "Oh! I dare say there would be discipline to attend to, and officers to obey; but there would be some change. I should not have to be tied down to a wretched writing-table, copy, copy, copy, the whole day long." "Change?" said Mrs Mallow, and she gazed wistfully in her son's face. "Yes, of course; one must have some excitement." He stood gazing out of the window, and did not notice the strange despairing look in his mother's eyes, one which seemed to tell of her own weary hours--weary years, passed upon that couch, with no hope of change save that of some day sinking into the eternal rest. It was evident that she was contrasting the selfishness of her son and his position with her own, and she sighed as she closed her eyes and lay there in silence for a time, uttering no reproach. Then came the day when the Rector was goaded almost to madness by the young man's follies, and the reports constantly reaching his ears of Frank's exploits at the principal hotel in billiard-playing and various unsavoury pursuits with one or other of the young farmers round. Reports these that lost nothing doubtless in the telling, and which never failed to reach the Rector in a way that seemed to suggest that he was answerable for his son's misdoings. Then followed other troubles, culminating in an affray with the keepers, an affair which, from the family friendship with old Lord Artingale, could easily have been hushed up; but the Rector jumped at the opportunity he found in his son's dread and evident anxiety to get away from the neighbourhood, so quite in a hurry Frank was shipped off to New Zealand. And there was peace at the Rectory? Nothing of the kind. There was the misery of hearing endless little stories of Frank's "carryings on," as they were termed; some bill was constantly being brought to the house, with a request that the Rector would pay it, and, to hide his son's disgrace, this he sometimes did. But the annoyance was none the less, and the Rector used to declare plaintively to his wife that if it were not for Julia and Cynthia he would run right away. "And for me, Eli," said the suffering woman, with a smile. "And for you, dear," he said, tenderly, and there was peace until some new peccadillo of the eldest son was discovered. Then to the Rector's dismay he found that Cyril--his mother's darling-- seemed to have taken a leaf out of his brother's book. If the younger brother's career had been to run upon a tram-line laid down by his elder brother, he could not have followed in the course more truly, and just as the Rector was beginning to feel calmed down and happy in the society of his two pretty daughters, troubles concerning Cyril kept cropping up.