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and everything to me in his absence.  Sturdy little Martyn too, was held by us to be the most promising of small boys.  He was a likeness of Clarence, only stouter, hardier, and without the delicate, girlish, wistful look; imitating Griff in everything, and rather a heavy handful to Emily and me when left to our care, though we were all the more proud of his high spirit, and were fast becoming a mutual admiration society.

What then were our feelings when Griff, always fearless, dashed to the rescue of a boy under whom the ice had broken in St. James’ Park, and held him up till assistance came?  Martyn, who was with him, was sent home to fetch dry clothes and reassure my mother, which he did by dashing upstairs, shouting, ’Where’s mamma?  Here’s Griff been into the water and pulled out a boy, and they don’t know if he is drowned; but he looks—­oh!’

Even after my mother had elicited that Martyn’s he meant the boy, and not Griff, she could not rest without herself going to see that our eldest was unhurt, greet him, and bring him home.  What happy tears stood in her eyes, how my father shook hands with him, how we drank his health after dinner, and how ungrateful I was to think Clarence deserved his name of Slow for having stayed at home to play chess with me because my back was aching, when he might have been winning the like honours!  How red and gruff and shy the hero looked, and how he entreated no one to say any more about it!

He would not even look publicly at the paragraph about it in the paper, only vituperating it for having made him into ’a juvenile Etonian,’ and hoping no one from Harrow would guess whom it meant.

I found that paragraph the other day in my mother’s desk, folded over the case of the medal of the Royal Humane Society, which Griff affected to despise, but which, when he was well out of the way, used to be exhibited on high days and holidays.  It seems now like the boundary mark of the golden days of our boyhood, and unmitigated hopes for one another.

CHAPTER IV—­UBI LAPSUS, QUID FECI

‘Clarence is come—­false, fleeting, perjured Clarence.’

King Richard III.

There was much stagnation in the Navy in those days in the reaction after the great war; and though our family had fair interest at the Admiralty, it was seven months before my brother went to sea again.  To me they were very happy months, with my helper of helpers, companion of companions, who made possible to me many a little enterprise that could not be attempted without him.  My father made him share my studies, and thus they became doubly pleasant.  And oh, ye boys! who murmur at the Waverley Novels as a dry holiday task, ye may envy us the zest and enthusiasm with which we devoured them in their freshness.  Strangely enough, the last that we read together was the Fair Maid of Perth.