Page:C Q, or, In the Wireless House (Train, 1912).djvu/25

 vicarage library, from which they both emerged very red.

Later in the afternoon the Hon. Evelyn, having escaped from her governess (she was only fifteen and three-quarters), met Micky, this time m the grove back of the second game-keeper’s and swore eternal fealty to him with her head on his shoulder, and they exchanged rings.

Ever since his father, the captain, had been killed before Bloemfontein in the early gray of an August morning by a whining Mauser bullet sent by a bushy-bearded Boer from an almost invisible kopje a mile away, and he had been taken out of school and sent to live with his uncle, his father’s younger brother, at Toppmgham, Micky had been in love with Evelyn Farquhar. He liked all girls and most boys just as they liked him, and why Evelyn inspired this particular ardor in his youthful heart he could not have explained. Perhaps it was because this motherless boy (his mother had died while bringing him into the world) had come to Toppingham racked with grief at the loss of his father and keenly sensitive to sympathy of any kind, and had remained so for a long time.