They reached Starhaven, and lifted the lifeless boy into the cart, and heard from Wright how the accident had taken place. Few boys were about the playground, so they got unnoticed to Roslyn, and Dr Underhay, who had been summoned, was instantly in attendance. He looked at Vernon for a moment, and then shook his head in a way that could not be mistaken. Eric saw it, and flung himself with uncontrollable agony on his brother's corpse. "O Vernon, Vernon, my own darling brother! O God, then he is dead!" And, unable to endure the blow, he fainted away. I cannot dwell on the miserable days that followed when the very sun in heaven seemed dark to poor Eric's wounded and crushed spirit. He hardly knew how they went by. And when they buried Vernon in the little green churchyard by Russell's side, and the patter of the earth upon the coffin--that most terrible of all sounds--struck his ear, the iron entered into his soul, and he had but one wish as he turned away from the open grave, and that was, soon to lie beside his beloved little brother, and to be at rest. VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TEN. THE LAST TEMPTATION. A quotation from Homer's Iliad, ix. 505. Time, the great good angel, Time, the merciful healer, assuaged the violence of Eric's grief, which seemed likely to settle down into a sober sadness. At first his letters to his parents and to Fairholm were almost unintelligible in their fierce abandonment of sorrow; but they grew calmer in time,--and while none of his school-fellows ever ventured in his presence to allude to Vernon, because of the emotion which the slightest mention of him excited, yet he rarely wrote any letters to his relations in which he did not refer to his brother's death, in language which grew at length both manly and resigned. A month after, in the summer term, he was sitting alone in his study in the afternoon (for he could not summon up spirit enough to play regularly at cricket), writing a long letter to his aunt. He spoke freely and unreservedly of his past errors,--more freely than he had ever done before,--and expressed not only deep penitence, but even strong hatred of his previous unworthy courses. "I can hardly even yet realise," he added, "that I am alone here, and that I am writing to my aunt Trevor about the death of my little brother, my noble, only brother, Vernon. Oh, how my whole soul yearns towards him. I _must_ be a better boy, I _will_ be better than I have been, in the hopes of meeting him again. Indeed, indeed, dear aunt, though I have been so guilty, I am laying aside, with all my might, idleness and all bad habits, and doing my very best to redeem the lost years. I do hope that the rest of my time at Roslyn will be more worthily spent than any of it has been as yet."