Never at a discount Alick Dudley was likely to be; and that truth, even while she sighed, Agnes dimly grasped. She did not know, she really could not imagine, what they were all to do without her brother; more especially at that juncture, when there was terrible sickness in the house—when, more than ever before in her life, Heather wanted help, and consolation, and encouragement. And yet Alick must go; the laws of the Medes and Persians were as likely to be reversed as the rules hung up in the clerks’ office in the great warehouse of Messrs. Elser, Wire, Hook, and Elser, Wood Street, City. Time and tide would about as probably wait the convenience of mankind, or humour the whims of womankind, as those gentlemen accept as apology for Alick’s non-appearance the fact of his niece being ill, and his sister-in-law in trouble. According to the mood in which the firm chanced to be, the members composing it would have intimated to Alick, either that it was a matter of the supremest indifference to them if the whole of his relations were dead and buried, or suggested that he had made a mistake in applying to them for a situation, since it was evidently a nurse’s berth he wanted at one of the hospitals. But, in whatever form of words they had couched their rejection, that rejection would have certainly been inevitable. No blame to the Messrs. Elser and Co. Of course the world cannot stand still because children fall ill, and women like to have their male relations near them in times of trouble. Heather, indeed, would have been the first to recognise this truth, had there arisen any question concerning it; but in that quiet Hertfordshire home it never occurred to a single soul within its walls that there could be a moment’s hesitation in the matter. Alick had to go; and, accordingly, he packed up his clothes, bade good-bye to “the mother,” not without tears, kissed all his sisters, received quite a volume of maternal advice from Mrs. Piggott, together with a box of sandwiches, prepared, apparently, under an impression that he was going to the Canary Isles, and had not the remotest chance of getting anything to eat till he arrived there; and, in the grey dawn, drove over in the pony cart to Palinsbridge, where he caught the eight o’clock up express, and entered the office of Messrs. Elser, Wire, Hook, and Elser, at ten—the hour at which he had been bidden to put in his first appearance. On the same day two letters were posted at Fifield: one to Arthur from Agnes—written in defiance of Heather’s wishes—telling the Squire of Lally’s accident, not lightly, as Heather had done, but fully and circumstantially, and informing him how ill, how very ill the child had remained ever since; and another, which having been penned with a great expenditure both of thought and ink, it may be as well to print it _in extenso_, for the information of my readers: