‘I say, Constable, you are a nice liberal-minded, benevolent fellow, not to speak an encouraging word to two poor beggars seeking to better themselves,’ interposed Harry Stanhope—partly in chaff, partly with a deeper meaning in his words. ‘You are trying on the supercilious dodge. But what would you have us turn our white hands to?’ holding up a pair of paws very brown and a good deal hacked about the knuckles. ‘We haven’t got any brains to speak of, between the two. Our education has been neglected, what with private tutors and Oxford. Poor Horry was bowled out without any fault of his as soon as the wicket was set up,’ he lowered his voice and said the last sentence in a cautious undertone. ‘We are a likely pair to shine in the learned professions, ain’t we?’ he resumed, with fresh spirit and light bravado. ‘All the people who have the misfortune to be connected with us have been in despair about what was to become of us ever since we were small shavers in petticoats. Indeed, I fancy it was rather a mistake our being here at all. They might have disposed of me in a marching regiment, where I might have had a fair chance of being comfortably knocked on the head and decently put out of sight, in a fashion becoming my station. But the Maori or Zulu, or whatever gallant native gentleman was to do the deed, must have looked sharp about it, else I was tolerably certain to go to the dogs or the Jews and create a scandal in the mean time. I put it to you how could I have helped it, Constable? I could not flatter myself, and what was more no groaning old fogey of a relation could cherish the forlorn hope that I was endowed with the genius of keeping out of debt and rising in the army, while all the time I should belong to a set who might be tailors’ sons and duffers of various kinds, yet would, for the most part, have ten and twenty guineas to spend in proportion to my one. Then we were two,’—here he dropped his voice again, and spoke more quickly to hide some under-current of feeling. ‘By Jove, I was not going to leave _him_ in the lurch, to be recommended to board and vegetate in the country with one of your needy parsons, as if Horry were a lunatic, or to be treated as a poor relation, and a hanger-on at other men’s tables.’ The speaker, whom Oliver had known incorrigibly light of heart and light of head in a world where even youthful beards are beginning to wag with ominous seriousness, finished with some genuine though repressed indignation. The listener could not refuse to Harry Stanhope the credit of fidelity to the solitary obligation he had owned—that of honest brotherly regard, and of a certain amount of reason in his statement.