“Oh, don’t cry,” he said as if the sight of her tears had added the last straw to his burden. “It can’t be helped, Evereld, and after all, had I got through my exam. I should have been going abroad before so very long. And you are going to school for a year. There will be no end of friends for you there.” “They won’t be like you,” sobbed Evereld, “You are just like my brother now. Oh, how I wish we were really brother and sister, then they couldn’t turn you out like this.” “I wish we were,” said Ralph with a sigh, as he realised how utterly he had now cut himself off from intercourse with her. “All we can do, I suppose, is to hear of each other through the Professor and Frau Rosenwald. They will never let me write to you at school. It’s not as if I were your brother really or even your cousin. They’re awfully strict at schools about that.” “Well,” said Evereld, resolutely drying her eyes, “We can write in the holidays, and in a little more than three years’ time I can do just exactly what I like. Promise, Ralph, that you will come to me when I am one and twenty. Promise me faithfully.” “I promise,” he said. But as he spoke it seemed to him that by that time a thousand things might have happened to divide them. He had a perception somehow that, once broken, that brotherly and sisterly intimacy could never again be the same thing. Later on, Evereld knew that it was indeed at an end, but for the moment his promise cheered her, and she set herself to work to make the most of the present. “Come,” she said, “tea is getting cold, and you must eat all you can, for who knows where you will dine. Oh, Ralph! what do you mean to do? Where shall you go in London?” “I think I shall go first to my father’s solicitor, old Mr. Marriott. He was kind to me when I left Whinhaven, and he will know the whole truth about things, and will perhaps advise me.” “Shall you go in for the Indian Civil again?” “I don’t think so, for most likely all that part is true enough. I must have failed badly; I never was any good at exams. No, I have a great idea of trying my luck on the stage. That was always my wish since the day when my father took me to see Washington. We often laughed over the plan and discussed it, and he had none of that horror of the stage which so many parsons profess to have.” “That would be delightful,--a thousand times better than going to India! And perhaps we shall go to see you act. And oh! perhaps you’ll get to know Macneillie!”