“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as to read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “‘Never saw anything to equal his pluck, except his patience--his colonel quite broke down when he bid him good-bye--so cheerful--and making jokes even up to----” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping. “He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then against his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries, striking the table beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of rage--“these,” pointing to the little relics tragic in their insignificance--“these are all that is left of him and his career! These are all that I have left to live on!” With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to hesitate her small attempt at solace. “Do we go _quite_ for nothing? You have _us_ left! We may not be much, but we are _something_!” No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been. “Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it keeps whole!” Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty. “Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked him very much! Oh!”--bowing her nut-brown head on his knees--“oughtn’t we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?” CHAPTER III The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the alternate object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia Carew’s home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a perhaps less foolish death within the year. Being one of those completely unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in belabouring, her husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the doubly forsaken baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had devolved the choice of two alternatives--that of saddling himself for life with a creature against whose entry into it he had always angrily protested, and that of sending it to the workhouse, and being called an unnatural brute for his pains. He chose the first; though, as everybody said, with a very ill grace. But the people who kindly tried to tell her this in later days could never get Sir George Campion’s niece to believe it.