She, who believed and disbelieved in a Higher Power, as most people do according to the favor or the frown which they consider the Higher Power gives them, was at this moment in the full fervor of belief, as she had money enough to let her do as she liked for a year or two. Roxhall could not touch her conscience; Hurstmanceaux could not rouse her shame; the sight of the closed gates of Harrenden House could not disturb that serenity which she had regained so successfully; but something did occur which momentarily disturbed and almost afflicted her. Jack had been usually kept down at Whiteleaf with his brothers; and a remote Northamptonshire country house amongst farmsteads, streams, and orchards, is not a centre of news. No word or sign had come to him of his friend, and in his occasional visits to town he had heard nothing of him. Though years had passed since Harry had bade him good-bye under the elm-tree, and children are usually forgetful, with little minds like sieves, Jack did not cease to lament his lost friend. If he had been sure where Harry had gone, he would have tried to get on board a ship and work his way out to the same place, like the cabin-boys he read of in story-books. But the South Pole was a vague destination; and he once heard some men saying, who had been Harry’s friends, that he was now in Uganda or Rhodesia. It was all so vague that it was impossible to plan any wanderings and voyages on such data. Mammy must know, he thought; but he could not bring himself to ask her. He had a vague but positive sense that Harry’s exile and disappearance were due to her; that she had been unkind and had hurt Harry in some way or another in some incurable and unmerciful manner. When Jack saw all the London life going on just the same--the Life Guards prancing, the ladies cycling or riding, the traffic filling up the streets, the carriages flashing toward the Park--his young heart ached with a dull painful sense of the heartlessness of things. Harry had always been there in that movement and glitter and rush; and now he was no more seen, and no one cared, not even his troop. Once he went up to Harry’s late colonel, whom he knew by sight, and asked straight out for news of him. The colonel looked surprised, for a long time had elapsed. “My dear boy, I don’t know at all where he is; he’s gone on the make somewhere, I believe. Out of sight, out of mind, you know, more shame for us.” What unkind, indifferent people they all were, thought Jack. But in the middle of June, when he was on his visit to his mother, there was a telegram in a morning paper which disinterred the buried name so dear to him. It said, in the usual niggard brevity, “Lord Brancepeth said to have been severely wounded fighting in Loomalia.” Now Harry’s late colonel was startled by that telegram as he sat at luncheon in his club; and as he walked an hour later across the Green Park he chanced to meet Jack and his tutor.