Her mother loosed her arm faintly with a sigh. ‘Yes, my dear, these are all good reasons,’ she said, resuming her habitual gentle calm. She had not been able to help making another little futile effort to draw her child to herself. And it had not been successful, that was all she knew. She could not have guessed with what tumultuous passion that young bosom was beating, nor how difficult it had been for Janet to keep down her agitation and say no more. CHAPTER XIII It was some years before the Towers was visited again. Tom went to Oxford and had a not very fortunate career there, which gave his mother a certain justification in resisting all attempts to take her back to what she felt to be so ill-omened a house. Beaufort took the common-sense part in these controversies. What did one house or another matter? he said. Why should one be ill-omened more than another? As well say that Oxford was ill-omened where Tom got into scrapes rather more easily than he could have done elsewhere; indeed, even Easton, the most peaceable place in the world, had not been without dangers for the headstrong boy whose passions were so strong and his prudence so small. A boy who is not to be trusted to keep his word, who cares only for his own pleasure, who likes everything he ought not to like, and cares for nothing that he ought, how should he be safe anywhere? Beaufort was too polite to say all these things about Carry’s boy, but he tried his best to persuade her that the discipline of having guests to entertain, and the occupation of shooting--‘something to do,’ which is so essential for every creature--would be the best things possible for Tom. Probably he was right, and she injudicious. Who can tell beforehand what procedure is the best? But poor Lady Car could not get out of her eyes Tom’s wild aspect as he had burst into the hall on that dreadful evening across the track of the procession going in to dinner. Peccadilloes of this kind had since been kept out of her sight, and she had tried to convince herself that it was the place and not the boy who had been in the wrong. And Janet somehow had come to share her mother’s disinclination for the Towers. Janet had received a letter, not long after her return to Easton, which had plunged her into the deepest alarm; it had, indeed, reached her innocently enough without any remark, being taken for a letter from one of her cousins at Dalrulzian, but it frightened her more than words could say. She had despatched a furtive note in reply, imploring ‘Mr. Charlie’ not to write--oh, not to write any more!--and promising eagerly not to forget either him or the pony if he only would do what she asked, and not write again. And poor Janet had been on the tenterhooks for a long time, terrified every day to see another missive arrive. She could scarcely believe in her good fortune when she found herself unmolested: but she was too much frightened to wish to return to the Towers.