place, I can't be turned against you, any more than she could,' and
she stroked his brow, which she found so throbbing as to account for
his paleness. 'You can grieve and hurt me, but you can't prevent me
from feeling for you, nor for your dear father's grief.'

He declared that people at home knew nothing about boys, and made an
uproar about nothing.

'Do you call falsehood nothing?'

'Falsehood! A mere trifle now and then, when I am driven to it by
being kept so strictly.'

'I don't know how to talk to you, Gilbert,' said Albinia, rising;
'your conscience knows better than your tongue.'

'Don't go;' and he went off into another paroxysm of crying, as he
caught hold of her dress; and when he spoke again his mood was
changed; he was very miserable, nobody cared for him, he did not know
what to do; he wanted to do right, and to please her, but Archie
Tritton would not let him alone; he wished he had never seen Archie
Tritton. At last, walking up and down with him, she drew from him a
full confidence, and began to understand how, when health and
strength had come back to him in greater measure than he had ever
before enjoyed, the craving for boyish sports had awakened, just
after he had been deprived of his brother, and was debarred from
almost every wholesome manner of gratifying it. To fall in with
young Tritton was as great a misfortune as could well have befallen a
boy, with a dreary home, melancholy, reserved father, and wearisome
aunt. Tritton was a youth of seventeen, who had newly finished his