A Bachelor Husband

SHE had always adored him. From the first moment he came to the house--an overgrown, good-looking schoolboy, and had started to bully and domineer over her, Marie Chester had thought him the most wonderful person in all the world. She waited on him hand and foot, she was his willing bondslave; she did not mind at all when once, in an unusual fit of eloquence, she had confided in him that she thought it was the loveliest thing on earth to have a brother, young Christopher answered almost brutally that she "talked rot, anyway, and that sisters were a bally nuisance!"

He looked at her with a sort of contempt for a moment, then added: "Besides, we're not brother and sister, really!"

They were not; but their fathers had been lifelong friends, and when George Chester's wife inconsiderately--or so her husband thought--died without presenting him with a son, and almost at the same time young Christopher Lawless was left an orphan, George Chester promptly adopted him.

"It will do Marie good to have a brother," he maintained, when his sister. Miss Chester, who kept house for him, raised an objection. "She's spoilt--shockingly spoilt--and a boy about the place will knock off some of her airs and graces."

Young Christopher certainly did that much, if no more, for in a fortnight he had turned Marie, who was naturally rather shy and reserved, into a tomboy who climbed trees with him regardless of injury to life and limb, who rode a cob barebacked round the paddock, who did, in fact, everything he dared or ordered her to do.

Miss Chester protested to Marie's father in vain.

"Christopher is ruining her; I can do nothing with her now! She is quite a different child since he came to the house."

Marie's father chuckled. He was not a particularly refined man, and the daintiness and shyness of his little daughter had rather embarrassed him. He was pleased to think that under Christopher's guiding hand she was what he chose to call "improving."

"Do her good!" he said bluntly. "Where's the harm? They're only children."

But the climax came rather violently when one afternoon Marie fell out of the loft into the yard below, and broke her arm.

One of the grooms went running to the rescue and picked her up, a forlorn little heap with a face as white as her frock.

"I fell out myself!" she said with quivering lips. "I fell out all my own self."

Young Christopher, who had clambered down the ladder from the loft, broke in violently:

"She didn't! It was my fault! She made me wild, and I pushed her. I didn't think she'd be so silly as to fall, though," he added, with an angry look at her. "And don't you trouble to tell lies about me."

The groom said afterwards that she had not shed a tear till then, but at the angry words she broke down suddenly into bitter sobbing.

She did not mind her broken arm, but she minded having offended Christopher. It was the greatest trouble she had ever known when-- as a consequence of the accident--Christopher was sent away to a boarding school.

Hereafter she only saw him by fits and starts during the holidays, and then he seemed somehow quite different.

He took but little notice of her, and he generally brought a friend home with him from school. He was getting beyond the "boy" stage, and developing a wholesome contempt for girls as a whole!

When--later--he went to a public school, he forgot to ignore her, and took to patronizing her instead. She wasn't such a bad little thing, he told her, and next term if she liked she might knit him a tie.