"Once more good-bye. When I return, I hope that I shall see leaning on your arm, a fair, a divine young bride.--Ever affectionately yours, De Vayne." Kennedy had written home to announce that his name was _not_ to be found in the list of Saint Werner's scholars. The information had disgusted his father exceedingly. Mr Kennedy, himself an old Wernerian, loved that royal foundation with an unchanging regard, and ever since that day Edward had been playing in his hall a pretty boy, he determined that he should be a Saint Werner's scholar at his first trial. He knew his son's abilities, and felt convinced that there must be some radical fault in his Camford life to produce such a disastrous series of failures and disgraces. Unable to gain any real information on the subject from Edward's letters, he determined to write up at once, and ask the classical and mathematical tutors the points in which his son was most deficient, and the reason of his continued want of success. The classical tutor, Mr Dalton, wrote back that Kennedy's failure was due solely to idleness; that his abilities were acknowledged to be brilliant, but that at Camford as everywhere else, the notion of success without industry, was a chimera invented by boastfulness and conceit. "Le Genie c'est la Patience." "You seem, however," continued Mr Dalton, "to be under the mistaken impression that your son read with me last term, and even `read double.' This is not the case, as he has ceased to read with me since the end of the Christmas term: I was sorry that he did so; for if economy was an object, I would gladly, merely for the sake of the interest I take in him, have afforded gratuitous assistance to so clever and promising a pupil." The letter of Mr Baer, the mathematical tutor, was precisely to the same effect. "I can only speak," he said, "from what I observed of your son previous to last Christmas; since then I have not had the pleasure of numbering him among my pupils." When Mr Dalton's letter came, Mr Kennedy was exceedingly perplexed to understand what it meant, and assumed that there must be some unaccountable mistake. He simply could not believe that his son could have asked him for the money on false pretences. But when Mr Baer's letter confirmed the fact that Kennedy had not been reading with a tutor either in classics or mathematics during the previous quarter, it seemed impossible for any one any longer to shut his eyes to the truth.