Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

218 RAVENSHOE,
the hands of strangers. Lord Welter, too, had raised money, and
lost fearfully by the same speculation.
There are some men who are always in the right place when
they are wanted, always ready to do good and kind actions, and
who are generally found "to the fore" in times of trouble. Such
a man was General Mainwaring. When Lord Ascot fell down
in a fit, he was beside him, and having seen him doing well, and
having heard from him, as he recovered, the fearful extent of the
disaster, he had posted across country to Ranford, and told Lady
Ascot.
She took it very quietly.
"Win or lose," she said, "it's all one to this unhappy house.
Tell them to get out my horses, dear General, and let me go to
my poor darling Ascot. You have heard nothing of Charles
Ravenshoe, General?"
" Nothing, my dear lady."
Charles had brushed his sleeve in the crowd that day, and had
longed to take the dear old brown hand in his again, but dared
not. Poor Charles! If he had only done so!
So the General and Lady Ascot went off together, and nursed
Lord Ascot; and Adelaide, pale as death, but beautiful as ever,
was driven home through the dust and turmoil, clenching her
hands impatiently together at every stoppage on the road.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
LORD WELTER'S MENAGE.
THERE was a time, a time we have seen, when Lord Welter
was a merry, humorous, thoughtless boy. A boy, one would have
said, with as little real mischief in him as might be. He might
have made a decent member of society, who knows? But, to do
him justice, he had had everything against him from his earliest
childhood. He had never known what a mother was, or a sister.
His earliest companions were grooms and gamekeepers; and his
religious instruction was got mostly from his grandmother, whose
old-fashioned Sunday-morning lectures and collect learnings, so
rigidly pursued that he dreaded Sunday of all days in the week,
were succeeded by cock-fighting in the Croft with his father in the
afternoon, and lounging away the evening among the stable-boys.
As Lord Saltire once said, in a former part of this story, " Ran