Roy bounded off in the best of spirits, and Mrs. Bryce remarked, "There is an opportunity to give up your scheme. Best possible punishment for the boy. Were he my boy he should suffer for his behaviour." "But Roy is _my_ son," the Colonel said, and there was an accent of pride in his voice. The pretty girl, with tall feathers in her bonnet, glided softly out of the room after Roy. She did not follow him far. She saw him vanish in the direction of the garden, flourishing his heels like a young colt, and she went the other way, towards the school-room. For Roy had told Molly about the Paris plan, and Polly guessed what that would mean to Molly. Mary Keene and her brother John, commonly known as "Polly" and "Jack," were not really cousins to Roy and Molly, though treated as such by the family. Their widowed grandmother, Mrs. Keene, had, some fourteen years earlier, married a second time--rather late in life--and her new husband, Mr. Fairbank, had one daughter, Harriette, then just married to Captain Baron. Two or three years later her own grandchildren, Jack and Polly, were left orphans, and were taken in permanently by Mr. and Mrs. Fairbank. When Mr. Fairbank died, some four or five years before this date, his twice-widowed wife took up her abode, with her grandchildren, in Bath, then a fashionable place of residence for "the quality." Jack, who was a year and more older than Polly had, at the beginning of this story, just been gazetted to a regiment of the line, which was quartered in Bath. Molly was very fond of Polly, and she had also a warm admiration for Jack; but no one in the world could be to her like her own twin-brother, Roy; and Roy's indifference to this first serious separation had cut her to the quick. When Polly entered the schoolroom, she at first thought that Molly had fled; but she detected a little heap in the farthest and darkest corner, and soon she heard the sound of a smothered sob, followed quickly by a second and a third. Polly waited a moment, to draw off her gloves, and then she made her way to the corner, sat down on the ground, and put a pair of gentle arms round the child.