“Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother right evil for their great goodness.” It is not long before Miss Carew has the opportunity either to put into execution or repent of the intention announced by her; for scarcely has Mrs. Darcy turned her back upon the scene of her failure, in crestfallen but quite unresentful sadness, before the successor whose coming she had deprecated is announced. Lavinia has let her friend go without any expression of apology or regret, and has watched her depressed slight back disappearing through the churchyard without one feeling but a vague sense of relief that she is out of the way. It takes all the self-control with which the rector’s wife is so plentifully endowed, to enable her to receive, with the proper amount of concern, the news, which reaches her when scarcely within the Rectory gate, that Baden Powell has done to death two of his Mafeking chickens, by the simple process of putting his large yellow foot upon them, and keeping it there in serene unconsciousness of their departing squeaks. Her _rôle_ is rendered easier by the fact that the children’s own grief at the catastrophe is much less than it would have been on any other day in the year, being merged in the far acuter one of their hero-playmate’s departure. There is nothing very heroic in the utterance with which their idol is answering the mute look which is the only greeting Lavinia can control herself into offering him. “Am I a greater scarecrow than you expected in this coat? I was told by a man I met in Pall Mall on Tuesday that I looked like a clothes-peg! Well, one might easily look like a worse thing; and, thank God, I never had much superfluous flesh!” It is clear that he scarcely knows what he is saying; and that, though his speech is perfectly rational in its triviality, it is so more by instinct and habit than by any conscious command over tongue or thought. “The doctors passed you?” she asks, squeezing out the words with a parsimony that proves how little trust she, for her part, can place in her organ of utterance. “Yes; they said that the voyage would finish setting me up. So it will.” The last clause is, as the girl feels, a reassurance addressed to the grudging doubt and negation in her eyes--the eyes that verify how loosely the clothes hang on a frame that betrays the fact more plainly than a less largely built one would have done. How easily, how reasonably, how nothing more than humanly, they--that callous Medical Board--might have sent him back--so little more than half-cured as he is--for another fortnight, another week! Another week! yes; that he might be here to dance at her wedding! “So this is your home! This is where you have spent your life!” Binning says, looking round at the room seen for the first and last time, and in which, in fancy, he will have to set her beside the armchair that he divines to be Sir George’s.