Oh! if I had but known! Bee felt not only miserable, but guilty, when her father’s touch came upon her hair. To think how little the dear mother’s presence told in that picture, and how much, how much! that of the man--who had been vulgarly untrue to her, a man without sense of purity or honour! One whose name she never desired to hear again. She could hardly accept the imputation of so much higher and nobler feeling which her father’s touch conveyed. The dear mother! who never condemned, who was always kind. She was moved to cry out in self-abasement, “It was not mamma I was thinking of, it was him! him!” But she did not do this. She raised her head and took up her work again with a trembling hand. “I suppose,” said Colonel Kingsward, as anxious as his daughter was to get away from a subject which was too moving for discussion, “that Charlie finds Kingswarden dull. It is not unnatural at his age, and I shall not object if he wishes to come to town for a week or so. His own good feeling, I hope, would keep him from anything unbecoming in the circumstances. But I must hear no more of this going to Oxford. It is quite out of the question. If he had shown any desire to go in for honours at the right time----. But now it is worse than folly. He must get through as quickly as he can, and take advantage of his nomination at once. Who can tell how soon it may be of no value? The Foreign Office may be thrown open, like all the rest, to every costermonger in the country, in a year or two, for anything one knows.” Charlie received this conclusion with disappointment, rapidly turning into rage and rebellion. “I should have thought the most old-fashioned old fogey in the world would have known better,” he cried. “What, prevent a man from reading when he is at the University! Did you ever hear of such a thing, Bee? Why, even a military man, though they are the most obstinate in the world, must know that to be really educated is everything in these days. A week in town! What do I care for a week in town? It is exactly like the man in the Bible who, being asked for bread, gave a stone.”