together now bowed her to the ground with a secret humiliation which she could never acknowledge--not to her sister, who also in the old days had put so much faith in Beaufort’s genius; not to Edward himself--oh no, to humiliate him. He did not seem to feel the contrast at all himself, or, if he did perceive it, he thought it apparently to be to his own advantage, speaking now and then of the narrowness of practical men, of the deadening influence of politics, and of how completely John Erskine’s interest was limited to matters of local expediency and questions before Parliament. ‘And he used to have his share of intelligence,’ said all unconscious the useless man, whose failure his wife felt so passionately. Then, as if this were not enough, there was Jock, little Jock, who was younger than Janet, only fourteen, but already at Eton like Tom, and holding a place above that of the seventeen-year-old big lower boy. The reader must understand that this history is not of to-day, and that in those times big lower boys were still possible, though it is so no longer. Tom was only a lower boy, and little Jock might have fagged his cousin, had it not been that Jock was in college, on the foundation, saving the money which was not too plentiful at Dalrulzian. ‘A Tug!’ Tom had cried with contempt intensified by the sense of something in his mother’s eyes, the comparison which made her heart sick. Little Jock at fourteen, so far above the boy who was almost a man: John Erskine, in his solid good sense, so much more important a man than Edward with his genius _manqué_. It went to Carry’s heart.