nicknamed among them “Teesh.” In 1852
the Carabineers came over to England, and were quartered
at Canterbury. They expected then to be sent
to India, but the order was countermanded, and Roger
saw himself doomed apparently to a life of inaction.
There is a letter of Roger’s among the mass
of correspondence which he kept up at this period
of his life, in which he notices the fact that his
mother still dwelt upon her old idea of providing
him with a wife in the shape of one of those Italian
princesses of which he had heard so much, and with
whom he had always been threatened. But Roger
was by this time in love with his cousin, and his
love was by no means happy. Roger had been for
years visiting at Tichborne before he had ever seen
his cousin Kate there. He had met her long before
when he came over as a child from Paris on a visit,
but Miss Doughty was too young at that time to have
retained much impression of the little dark-haired
French boy, who could hardly have said “Good
morning, cousin,” in her native tongue.
When Roger was twenty years of age, they met for a
few days at Bath, where both had come on the melancholy
duty of taking leave of Mr. Seymour, then lying dangerously
ill and near his death. Then they parted again;
Roger went to Tichborne for a long stay, but Miss
Doughty returned to school at the convent at Taunton.
In the Midsummer holidays, however, they once more
met at the house in Hampshire, and for six weeks the
young cousins saw each other daily. Then Miss
Doughty went away to Scotland with her parents; and
the youth took upon himself the pleasant duty of going
to see the party take their departure from St. Katherine’s
Wharf. October found the party again assembled
at Tichborne Park; and there Roger took farewell of
uncle, aunt, and cousin, to go to Ireland and join
his regiment; and Miss Doughty, whose schooldays were
not yet ended, went down to a convent at Newhall,
in Essex. When Roger got a short leave of absence,
his first thought was to visit his uncle and aunt,
who had so affectionate a regard for him. There
was a summer visit to Upton, in Dorsetshire, for a
week, when Miss Doughty happened to be there; and there
was a visit to Tichborne in January 1850, when there
were great festivities, for Roger then attained his
majority; again the cousins took farewell, and met
no more for eighteen months. No wonder Roger loved
Tichborne, with all its associations. In that
well-ordered and affectionate household he found a
tranquillity and happiness to which he had been a
stranger in his own home. In his correspondence
with his father and mother at this time there were
no lack of tokens of a loving son; but no one was
more sensible than Roger of the miseries of that life
which he had led up to the day when he came away to
pursue his studies at the Jesuit College, and to learn
to be an Englishman. But there was another association,
long unsuspected, yet growing steadily, until it absorbed
all his thoughts, and gave to that neighbourhood a


