Heroes too, naval and military, passed in review, in park or street, before these young people. They were evidently desirous to store their minds with the exact presentment of the demigods of the race, ‘in their habit’ as they lived, for retrospective meditation. Kitchener was in the Soudan again, but they had sight and heard speech of Lord Roberts—Roberts of Kandahar!
‘Then we put the lances down, Then the bugles blew, as we rode to Kandahar, Marching two and two,’
quoted Vanda. He was mounted, looking a horseman and a soldier, every inch of him, from plume to spur—carried by a lovely charger, but _not_ on the historical Arab. Much they grieved that Volonel the beauteous, the high-born, the beloved, had passed away to the land of the ‘Great Dead.’
‘Do you believe,’ queried Vanda, ‘that the dear horses we have all known, and loved and mourned, are denied a future life, when so many of our rubbishy fellow-creatures, idle, criminal and despicable in every sense, are to be pardoned and promoted? I hardly can. It seems inconsistent with the scheme of eternal justice.’
‘It is a large question,’ replied Reggie, ‘and besides, my dear Vanda, you are not old enough to argue on debatable points of doctrine. It is hardly edifying at your age.’
Of course there had been a great meeting with ‘the boys,’ by which endearing term the Cambridge students were known in the family. They did not lose much time, it may be believed, before presenting themselves at the Hotel Cecil, in which palace a telegram from Paris notified that the family had taken apartments. They were received with acclamation, and their growth in ‘wisdom and stature’ was favourably remarked upon by Hermione and Vanda. Certainly they were good specimens of the Anglo-Saxon youth of the day, whether reared in Great or Greater Britain. Tall, well proportioned, athletic, well dressed, and showing ‘good form,’ which means so many indefinable qualities and habitudes, it may be imagined with what pride and joy their parents gazed on them, and how, from very joy and thankfulness, their mother’s eyes overflowed as her loving arms embraced her first-born and his brother. Their father’s short but fervent greeting was not effusive, after the manner of Englishmen, but none the less heartfelt and secretly joyful. As such, fully understood by the sons of the house.