propensity to succumb to violent headaches, which she dignified, or as her husband preferred to think, Frenchified by calling migraines. The old family doctor attributed them to nerves, and nerves, Sir Richard felt, were French, not English, so that if Doctor Wilkinson was right, the headaches must have been inherited from her French mother. There was nothing of the Frenchman in the elder son John. He never had a headache in his life, and he had won the Victoria Cross. English to the backbone was John. But Edward...? Sir Richard, who had been trotting gaily along his boundaries, pulled up his horse to a walk, because the personality and character of his younger son perplexed him. Edward had headaches, was prone to day-dreaming, and at twenty-eight showed no sign of making any progress at the Bar, to which without apparently the slightest taste for a legal career he had recently been called. Headaches, day-dreams, instability, these were not English qualities. What had Edward been doing down at home all the summer? How could he expect to be a successful barrister if he left his chambers in Pump Court to take care of themselves? If John had been a barrister, he would have made his mark by now. Yet Edward had been endowed with more brains than John. John was diligent, determined; but Edward had the brains. It had been the ancient custom of the Flowers to send the eldest son to Winchester, the others to Eton. Sir Richard, who was a Wykhamist, had broken the tradition by sending John to Eton and Edward to Winchester, partly because he thought that Winchester would eradicate more sternly any French symptoms that appeared in Edward, partly because he believed that what was known as cleverness in a boy would receive more encouragement at the older foundation. But Edward had been a disappointment. His career at Winchester had been undistinguished, and he had gone down from New College without taking a degree. That was the moment when his father should have been firm with him, when he should have insisted upon his making his own way in the world without parental assistance. But Helen had intervened, and she intervened so rarely that when she did her husband was always defeated. Edward had expressed a half-hearted desire to read for the Bar, and he had allowed himself to be persuaded into making the necessary allowance. What was the result? Edward at twenty-eight as little able to provide for himself as he was at eight! It had been all very well for his mother to plead for his company over long months at Barton to console her for the absence of her elder son first in the Crimea and then in India. But John had been back a year now, and Edward spent more time than ever at home. Confound it, the problem of Edward's future was spoiling the day, and in a burst of irritation the baronet spurred his horse to a canter.