It goes against all prejudices to imagine that John Tatham, a man who never had had a child, an old bachelor not too tolerant of youth, should have divined the boy better than his mother. But he did, perhaps because he was a lawyer, and accustomed to investigate the human countenance and eye. He saw that Philip was full of something of his own, immediately interesting to himself; and he cast about quickly in his mind what it could be. Not that the boy was heir to a peerage: he would never have come like _this_ to announce _that_: but something that Philip was cruelly disappointed his mother did not remember. This passed through John's mind like a flash, though it takes a long time to describe. "Ah," he said, "I begin to divine. Was not there something about a--scholarship?" "Pippo!" cried Elinor, lighting up great lamps of relief, of sudden ease and quick coming joy, in her brightened eyes and face. "My boy! you've won your battle! You've got it, you've got it, Pippo! And your foolish, stupid mother that thought for a moment you could rush to her like this with anything but good news!" It took a few moments to soothe Pippo down, and mend his wounded feelings. "I began to think nobody cared," he said, "and that made me that I didn't care myself. I'd rather Musgrave had got it, if it had not been to please you all. And you never seemed so much as to remember--only Uncle John!" he added after a moment, with a half scorn which made John laugh at the never-failing candour of youth. "Only the least important of all," he said. "It was atrocious of the ladies, Philip. Shake hands, my boy, I owe you five pounds for the scholarship. And now I'll take myself off, which will please you most of all." He went down-stairs laughing to himself all the way, but got suddenly quite grave as he stepped outside--whether because he remembered that it does not become a Q.C. and M.P. to laugh in the street, or for other causes, it does not become us to attempt to say. And Elinor meanwhile made it up to her boy amply, and while her heart ached with the question what to do with him, how to dispose of him during those dreadful following days, behaved herself as if her head too was half turned with joy and exultation, only tempered by the regret that Musgrave, who had worked so hard, could not have got the scholarship too. CHAPTER XLI.