It was very difficult for Rowland to decide what course he ought to pursue practically at the moment after these bewildering experiences. He was a man who had a great contempt for what he would himself have called shilly-shallying, and for the impotence which could be mastered by difficulties, and could not make the most of a trying situation. He would a little time before have scoffed at the possibility of any such thing happening to himself. No such thing had ever happened in the course of his work, which had involved many interests far more important than the interests of two insignificant creatures--girl and boy: which had sometimes been weighted with the responsibility of life and death for many; and yet he had not paused and hesitated as now. Two insignificant creatures, girl or boy, will blot out earth and even heaven from you, standing so near as they do, annihilating all perspective. What short work would he have made with them had they been a gang of navvies, or more difficult, a staff of clerks or engineers! But Marion and Archie were a very different matter. They had a right not only to all he could do for them, but to himself and everything that was best in him. Nothing could do away with that claim of nature. Not disapproval, dissatisfaction on his part, not even unworthiness on theirs. And they were not unworthy, poor things. Their only fault it was, and it was not their fault, that their father was in one atmosphere and they in another. Not their fault! he it was who had left them in that atmosphere--condemned them to it, and he must bear the penalty. They enjoyed their day in the carriage, driving about wherever they liked, displaying their grandeur to admiring friends--at least Marion enjoyed it to the bottom of her heart. And she was _bon prince_ in her elevation. She waited in all her splendour at the door of a little house, where everybody came to the window to stare at “the carriage” while a sick girl was hastily dressed in her best--and took the invalid out for a drive. There was a vain kindness in the girl, and a warm desire to bestow favours which was partly the product of vanity and partly of a better inspiration. She was really proud and happy when the colour came faintly into the cheeks of her ailing friend, although she never failed afterwards to attribute her recovery to “yon drive I took you.” The kindness was vulgar, and fed conceit, yet it was kindness in its way. Archie was not perhaps so happy. He soon tired of “the carriage,” and desired to be left at the cricket ground, which they again visited, and joined his friends, not without a certain glow of superior rank and importance about him from the fact of his being dropped there by the carriage, yet glad to escape from a position that was tiresome.