sacred to the secular; and Ethel owned that the perfectly pronounced words and admirable taste made her singing very different from that which adorned most dinner-parties. Dr. May intensely enjoyed, and was between tears and bravos at the charge of the Six Hundred, when the two brothers entered, and stood silently listening.
That return brought a change. Aubrey was indeed open and bright, bursting out with eager communications the moment the song ceased, then turning round with winning apologies, and hopes that he was not interrupting; but Tom looked so stiff and polite as to chill every one, and Averil began to talk of the children's bed-time.
The Doctor and Aubrey pressed for another song so earnestly that she consented; but the spirit and animation were gone, and she had no sooner finished than she made a decided move to depart, and Dr. May accompanied the party home.
'Is my father going to put that fellow to bed?' said Tom, yawning, as if injured by the delay of bed-time thus occasioned.
'Your courtesy does not equal his,' said Ethel.
'Nor ever will,' said Tom.
'Never,' said Ethel, so emphatically that she nettled him into adding,
'He is a standing warning against spoiling one's patients. I wouldn't have them and their whole tag-rag and bobtail about my house for something!'
'O, Tom, for shame!' cried Mary, bursting out in the wrath he had intended to excite.
'Ask him which is tag, which rag, and which bobtail,' suggested Ethel.
'Mab, I suppose,' said Gertrude, happily closing the discussion, but it was re-animated by her father's arrival.
'That's a nice girl,' he said, 'very nice; but we must not have her too often in the evening, Mary, without Henry. It is not fair to break up people's home party.'
'Bobber than bobtail,' murmured Tom, with a gesture only meant for Ethel.
'Ave said he would be out till quite late, papa,' said Mary, in self-defence.
'She ought to have been back before him,' said Dr. May. 'He didn't seem best pleased to have found her away, and let me tell you, young woman, it is hard on a man who has been at work all day to come home and find a dark house and nobody to speak to.'
Mary looked melancholy at this approach to reproof, and Tom observed in an undertone,
'Never mind, Mary, it is only to give papa the opportunity of improving his pupil, while you exchange confidence with your bosom friend. I shall be gone in another month, and there will be nothing to prevent the perfect fusion of families.'
No one was sorry that the evening here came to an end.
'I hope,' said Dr. May at the Sunday's dinner, 'that the cricket match has not done for that boy; I did not see him among the boys.'
'No,' said Mary, 'but he has met with some accident, and has the most terrible bruised face. Ave can't make out how he did it. Do you know, Aubrey?'
The Doctor and his two sons burst out laughing.
'I thought,' said Ethel, rather grieved, 'that those things had gone out of fashion.'
'So Ethel's protege, or prodigy, which is it?' said Tom, 'is turning out a muscular Christian on her hands.'
'Is a muscular Christian one who has muscles, or one who trusts in muscles?' asked Ethel.
'Or a better cricketer than an Etonian?' added the Doctor.
Tom and Aubrey returned demonstrations that Eton's glory was untarnished, and the defeat solely owing to 'such a set of sticks.'
'Aubrey,' said Ethel, in their first private moment, 'was this a fight in a good cause? for if so, I will come down with you and see him.'
Aubrey made a face of dissuasion, ending in a whistle.
'Do at least tell me it is nothing I should be sorry for,' she said anxiously.
He screwed his face into an intended likeness of Ethel's imitation of an orchis, winked one eye, and looked comical.
'I see it can't be really bad,' said Ethel, 'so I will rest on your assurance, and ask no indiscreet questions.'
'You didn't see, then?' said Aubrey, aggrieved at the failure of his imitation. 'You don't remember the beauty he met at Coombe?'
'Beauty! None but Mab.'
'Well, they found it out and chaffed him. Fielder said he would cut out as good a face out of an old knob of apple wood, and the doctor in petticoats came up again; he got into one of his rages, and they had no end of a shindy, better than any, they say, since Lake and Benson fifteen years ago; but Ward was in too great a passion, or he would have done for Fielder long before old Hoxton was seen mooning that way. So you see, if any of the fellows should be about, it would never do for you to be seen going to bind up his wounds, but I can tell him you are much obliged, and all that.'
'Obliged, indeed!' said Ethel. 'What, for making me the laughing-stock of the school?'
'No, indeed,' cried Aubrey, distressed. 'He said not a word—they only found it out—because he found that seat for you, and papa sent him away with you. They only meant to poke fun, and it was his caring that made it come home to him. I wonder you don't like to find that such a fellow stood up for you.'
'I don't like to be made ridiculous.'
'Tom does not know it, and shall not,' eagerly interposed Aubrey.
'Thank you,' said she, with all her heart.
'Then don't be savage. You know he can't help it if he does think you so handsome, and it is very hard that you should be affronted with him, just when he can't see out of one of his eyes.'
'For that matter,' said Ethel, her voice trembling, 'one likes generosity in any sort of a cause; but as to this, the only way is to laugh at it.'
Aubrey thought this 'only way' hardly taken by the cachinnation with which she left him, for he was sure that her eyes were full of tears; and after mature consideration he decided that he should only get into a fresh scrape by letting Leonard know that she was aware of the combat and its motive.
'If I were ten years younger, this might be serious,' meditated Ethel. 'Happily, it is only a droll adventure for me in my old age, and I have heard say that a little raving for a grown-up woman is a wholesome sort of delusion, at his time of life. So I need not worry about it, and it is pretty and touching while it lasts, good fellow!'
Ethel had, in fact, little occasion to worry herself; for all special manifestations of Leonard's devotion ceased. Whether it were that Tom with his grave satirical manner contrived to render the house disagreeable to both brother and sister, or whether Leonard's boyish bashfulness had taken alarm, and his admiration expended itself in the battle for her charms, there was no knowing. All that was certain was, that the Wards seldom appeared at Dr. May's, although elsewhere Mary and Aubrey saw a great deal of their respective friends, and through both, Ethel heard from time to time of Leonard, chiefly as working hard at school, but finding that his illness had cost him not only the last half year's learning, but some memory and power of application. He was merging into the ordinary schoolboy—a very good thing for him no doubt, though less beautiful than those Coombe fancies. And what were they worth?
CHAPTER VII
Little
