Harry, her eldest born, in face and manner resembled his father. The mother’s beauty, something too, perhaps, of her delicacy, reappeared in her daughter. There was the same pale lustre, the same transparency, the same (yet not the same) foreshadowing of death. A stranger looking at either of them would have said that she was one of those whom the gods love too well. To her children, as to her husband, Lady Venniker seemed ever as a vision of delight--a being too good, too fair, too sensitive for earth. Born and bred in such a home, Harry Venniker, if he looked to his future life, must have seen it traced for him in clear and definite lines. To go to St. Anselm’s, the school in which his family had been educated for four generations, to distinguish himself not so much in work as in cricket and football, to get into the army, to spend a few years in the House of Commons and then to become a respectable peer and country gentleman, to be in fact what his father had been before him, and his grandfather before his father, was his ambition, if anything so natural and, as it seemed, so inevitable, could be strictly called an ambition. He was at this time, like so many English boys when they enter upon public school life, a splendid animal, healthy, vigorous, proud, elate, with no low tastes, possibly without any high aims, taking life as it came, and being content to enjoy it fully, but having no special sense of a vocation or mission in life. After all, the world’s missionaries are but few, abroad or at home, and the world would not be so comfortable if they were numerous. For it is the missionary’s business to disturb and upset established things, and there are secular missionaries (who are sometimes called ‘bores’) as well as spiritual. Harry Venniker must not be blamed if his vocation or mission remained obscure to him in boyhood. But he owed to his mother not only his sunny smile (although his had not as yet, like hers, a tinge of sadness) and his rich curling auburn hair, but the generous sympathy--derived from her example still more than from her precept--which made it impossible for him to resist the silent appeal of suffering or to withhold his aid if it were invoked in the cause of weakness and sorrow. It was this sympathy, spontaneously elicited, which had led him to swear eternal friendship with a boy so dissimilar to himself as Gerald Eversley. Until now Harry Venniker had had no great friend, or his only friend had been his sister.