Laurie went back to his musings and his papers when she had made him this promise;--and Mrs. Westbury had a good cry over the whole miserable business. ‘Upset me!’ she said to herself, ‘as if I was a woman like his mother to be upset! Oh, if I could but do anything for these poor boys!’ But at the same time she was glad in her heart that Laurie thought of Mary only as his sister. A mother has to consider everything; and that could never have been,--though it was a different thing with Ben. These preliminaries, being told, and the singular and unexpected nature of this family crisis fully explained, the historian of the Renton family feels justified in proceeding with this narrative of the fortunes of the three boys, and their adventures in the big changed world, upon which they were launched so abruptly. They all left the Manor together on a sultry September day, just the day on which, under other circumstances, they would have been off to shoot grouse or to climb Mont Blanc. Their mourning prevented such invitations as even in their changed fortune they would certainly have received, and the shock was so fresh on all of them that pleasure-making of any kind would have been impossible. They went out as if they had been put to sea, each man in his own bark, with no very sure compass or chart to rely on, and with minds braced high by resolution, but altogether unprepared for the trial, and unaccustomed to the labour. Perhaps it was as well for them that their ideas were so utterly vague and undefined touching the rocks and shoals and dangerous passages that lay in their way. CHAPTER IV. THE ELDEST SON.