“Do you never whistle, Lord De Vaux?” she asked curiously one day. “My brother Berry is a great whistler, and I miss the music. I know it is very homely music, but none seems to me so blythe or so straight from the heart. I wish girls might whistle if they could. I will confess to you I have tried and failed. Berry said it was the feeblest attempt at the magnificent—like a mouse squeaking.” He did not answer her that he had no heart-hilarity from which to whistle, and that he had sometimes been moved to envy a ploughboy who went whistling joyously past him, only pausing to take off his cap to the young lord on his walk or ride. The next time De Vaux was in his room, with the door ajar, and was aware that Lady Margaret was going along the corridor, he whistled with all his might, though it took away his breath, so unwonted was the performance; and involuntarily he fell into a solemn and stately measure, like the “Dead March in Saul.” Still, he responded to her suggestion better than Carlo had done, and he made her laugh—though he was happily unconscious of it—at his doleful strain. She called him to herself “the melancholy Jaques,” and said, though he was a product of the age, a specimen of the kind existed in the time of Queen Elizabeth. But I don’t know that Lady Margaret thought the worse of him, or liked him the less, because of her private wit at his expense; though he—being, like other young men, stupid where young girls are concerned—might have been at that date hurt and offended, and even imagined that she despised him because she made game of him. One morning, as an excuse for his elegant idleness—of which he began to feel slightly ashamed, when he was forced to see how busy this delicate little girl was, and generally on the behalf of others—he repeated to her the speech he had addressed to his mother, of his wanting a modern crusade to induce him to put on his armor. “But there is a crusade going on all around us, for every one of us, always,” she said, opening her eyes wide. “We have never been without one since”—she stopped, but he knew what she meant. “I quite envy those fellows who have their own way to make in the world,” he observed on another occasion, still with an underlying motive of self-defence, and speaking in allusion to her younger brothers’ work in their military and naval schools. “Oh! but Berry does most of all,” she explained promptly; “and he is an eldest son—like you, I had almost said, but you are an only son and child. I pity you, if you will forgive me for pitying you.” “Not forgive, but thank you, and I pity myself,” he answered quickly, for it had at that moment struck him that, if he had possessed an admiring sister to quote him as she quoted “Berry,” or to look up to and depend upon him as she described her schoolboy brothers looking up to and depending on their elder brother, he might have had more faith in himself, and more inducement for exertion.