“Oh!” he cried, with delight. He was on the north side of the Park, no one was near, and Brancepeth was walking where he had no business to be, as he was on foot. He came up to the child and greeted him, then turned to the groom: “I want to speak to the Duke a minute or two. You will wait here,” he said, as he slipped a gold piece into the man’s hand. “Jump off, Jack, and come with me.” Jack needed no second bidding. The groom, with the sovereign in his whip hand, made no opposition, and Harry walked away with the boy across the grass, talking to him as they went of horsemanship and all its etiquette, while Jack’s face, gay and rosy in its happiness, was turned upward with adoring eyes. “I thought I shouldn’t see you again, Harry,” he said, as he trotted along by his friend’s side. “We’re all going into the country to-morrow.” “With your mother?” asked Brancepeth. “No; mammy’s at Ems. Boo’s so cross ’cos she’s got to stay with us. She won’t play at anything.” “When did your mother go?” “Day before yesterday.” Brancepeth sighed. “And she didn’t leave ’ny money, and she didn’t leave ’ny orders for us, and the servants went away, and there was nothin’ to eat, and the scullery-maid she came upstairs, and said: ‘You duckies, I’ll buy you chops if I go without a new hat,’ and nurse said she was an imperent jade, and we didn’t get ’ny chops, and somebody sent to uncle Ronnie, and he came and gived money, and I told him of the scullery-maid, and he gived her half a sovereign, and said, ‘You’re a good girl,’ and that I heard, and we and the dogs and horses go down this afternoon.” Jack drew a long breath after his eloquence, and added, “Harriet is gone down into Essex to see her mother, who’s dyin’, or _she’d_ have bought the chops.” There were very few persons on the north side of the Park, and they went on across the grass until they had got out of sight of the groom, and came up to an elm-tree with a circular bench round its roots. “Let’s sit down a moment, Jack,” said Harry. “It will be a long time perhaps before I see you again.” “Why?” said Jack, in alarm. “Are you going to Ems?” “No, dear--I am not going to Ems,” said Brancepeth sadly, looking down at the boy’s face, with the golden nimbus of its ruffled hair and the black circle of the sailor hat framing the hair as in an ebon frame. There was no one near. The great elm trunk was behind them like a wall, and its branches above them like a roof. How far away they seemed, those pleasant summers when, as the London season ended, he and she had planned their meetings at this bath or at the other, and Cocky, pliant, philosophic Cocky, had said always opportunely: “You’ll come too, won’t you, Harry? Filthy feeding and beastly waters, but they set one on one’s legs again somehow or other.”