“If she had not done it the children would have been destitute, Sophy. It was my business to make her do it, unless she had been willing to ruin the children.” “Not me,” cried Reginald, loudly. “He could not have taken anything from me. She might have stuck to me, and I should have taken care of her. What had she to be frightened about? I suppose,” he added after a pause, “there would have been plenty--to keep all the children too--” “Highcourt is not such a very large estate, Rex. Lowdean and the rest are unentailed. You would have been much impoverished too.” “Oh!” Reginald cried, with an angry frown; but then he turned to another side of the question, and continued vehemently, “Why on earth, when she knew papa was so cranky and had it all in his power, why did she aggravate him? I think they must all have been mad together, and just tried how to spite us most!” cried the boy, with a rush of passionate tears to his eyes. The house was miserable altogether. He wanted his breakfast, and he had no heart to eat it. He could not bear the solemn spying of the servants. Dorrington, in particular, would come to the door of the breakfast-room and look in with an expression of mysterious sympathy for which Reginald would have liked to kill him. “I wish I had never come away from school at all. I wish I were not going back. I wish I were anywhere out of this,” he cried. But he did not suggest again that his mother should have “stuck to” him. He wanted to know why somebody did not interfere; why this thing and the other was permitted to be done. “Some one could have stopped it if they had tried,” Reginald said; and that was Aunt Sophy’s opinion too.