‘Shall you both like it so very much? Then,’ said Lady Car, sitting straight up with a look of pale resolution in her face which did not seem called for by such a simple determination, ‘then, children, you shall go----’ ‘Hurrah!’ cried Tom, ‘that’s the jolliest thing I’ve heard for long; that’s exactly what I want! I want to know it,’ he cried; ‘I do want to know it before I go there and settle down.’ Lady Car turned her eyes upon him with a wonderful, inquiring look. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural. Yet to hear that someone would go there, not for holidays, but to settle down, oppressed poor Carry’s soul. She faded into whiteness, as if she were fainting. It seemed to her that his father looked over Tom’s shoulder--the father whom the boy was so like--his living image, as people said. Not so tall and strong, but with the features and the eyes and the aspect, which poor Carry had so feared. ‘Beau!’ cried both the young people in one voice. ‘Oh, I believe it’s his doing, Tom!’ ‘He must have a hand in it, Jan!’ ‘Beau, next holidays we are going to the Towers. Mother says so. We are going next holidays to the Towers.’ ‘Your mother is full of sense,’ said Beaufort, who had just come in. ‘I knew that she would see it to be the right thing to do.’ Poor Carry! She felt as if she could not bear it, this sacrifice of all her own feelings and wishes. She said to herself that she could not do it; that before the time came she must die! And perhaps there was a forlorn hope that this was what would happen in her heart as she sat and saw her husband and her children rejoicing over the tea-table--most naturally, most justly, she knew; at least it was but natural and just so far as the children were concerned.