“No:  and I do not think she is afraid for you.”

“Not as she is for you, Fred; but then boys are so much more precious than girls, and besides they love to endanger themselves so much, that I think that is reasonable.”

“Uncle Geoffrey thinks there is something nervous and morbid in it,” said Fred:  “he thinks that it is the remains of the horror of the sudden shock—­”

“What?  Our father’s accident?” asked Henrietta.  “I never knew rightly about that.  I only knew it was when we were but a week old.”

“No one saw it happen,” said Fred; “he went out riding, his horse came home without him, and he was lying by the side of the road.”

“Did they bring him home?” asked Henrietta, in the same low thrilling tone in which her brother spoke.

“Yes, but he never recovered his senses:  he just said ‘Mary,’ once or twice, and only lived to the middle of the night!”

“Terrible!” said Henrietta, with a shudder.  “O! how did mamma ever recover it?—­at least, I do not think she has recovered it now,—­but I meant live, or be even as well as she is.”

“She was fearfully ill for long after,” said Fred, “and Uncle Geoffrey thinks that these anxieties for me are an effect of the shock.  He says they are not at all like her usual character.  I am sure it is not to be wondered at.”

“O no, no,” said Henrietta.  “What a mystery it has always seemed to us about papa!  She sometimes mentioning him in talking about her childish days and Knight Sutton, but if we tried to ask any more, grandmamma stopping us directly, till we learned to believe we ought never to utter his name.  I do believe, though, that mamma herself would have found it a comfort to talk to us about him, if poor dear grandmamma had not always cut her short, for fear it should be too much for her.”

“But had you not always an impression of something dreadful about his death?”

“O yes, yes; I do not know how we acquired it, but that I am sure we had, and it made us shrink from asking any questions, or even from talking to each other about it.  All I knew I heard from Beatrice.  Did Uncle Geoffrey tell you this?”

“Yes, he told me when he was here last Easter, and I was asking him to speak to mamma about my fishing, and saying how horrid it was to be kept back from everything.  First he laughed, and said it was the penalty of being an only son, and then he entered upon this history, to show me how it is.”

“But it is very odd that she should have let you learn to ride, which one would have thought she would have dreaded most of all.”

“That was because she thought it right, he says.  Poor mamma, she said to him, ’Geoffrey, if you think it right that Fred should begin to ride, never mind my folly.’  He says that he thinks it cost her as much resolution to say that as it might to be martyred.  And the same about going to school.”

“Yes, yes; exactly,” said Henrietta, “if she thinks it is right, bear it she will, cost her what it may!  O there is nobody like mamma.  Busy Bee says so, and she knows, living in London and seeing so many people as she does.”