in these respects, a fitting object for sympathy, the public never was quite able to make up its mind; for before such a desirable end could be attained, death, to the regret of all who knew him, cut short the earthly career of one who might truly have been called the “poor man’s friend.” Arthur Vavasour had just completed his fifteenth year--he being then in the fifth form at Eton--when he received the direful intelligence of a loss which, to him, was truly an irreparable one. The casualty which rendered him an orphan had from the first been pronounced by the medical men to be a serious case. It was occasioned by the accidental going-off of a gun in the hand of a careless under-keeper, one bright May morning, when Mr. Vavasour and his younger son, who was the private pupil of a neighbouring clergyman, were rook-shooting in a distant part of Gillingham Chace. For several days Cecil Vavasour continued to suffer much and patiently; then on a sudden all pain left him, and he knew that his doom was sealed. The report of Mr. Vavasour’s danger spread rapidly through the country, and people flocked in crowds to the lodge-gates of Gillingham to learn the truth, and to inquire, with hushed voices and with saddened looks, whether there were any hope that the good man whose days were numbered might yet be spared to them. For, if they had never known the value of Cecil Vavasour before, they recognised it now. When he was about to be removed from amongst them, there was scarcely one amongst the poor, the sorrowful, and the troubled but remembered some act of generosity, some sympathising word, some excellent advice bestowed in time of need. It seemed difficult to realise the truth that such a man--one too in the full vigour of his life and strength--was so early destined to go the way of all flesh. To be sure he was but enduring the lot appointed for everyone that is born of a woman, and _why_ men should show longer faces, and talk with more whispering voices of the accidents and losses of the great and wealthy than they are given to do of the self-same misfortunes when they befall those who are formed of more common clay, it may at first sight be difficult to understand; but the fact that so it is remains the same. And thus it chanced that the Lady Millicent, self-absorbed and phlegmatic though she was, elicited in her threatened widowhood far more of general sympathy and interest than would have been awarded to a hundred bereaved and penniless women sobbing out their hearts’ grief in an atmosphere of poverty and dirt, and surrounded by ragged orphans howling for the bread-winner who would return to them no more for ever.