"I've heard nothing about it," said Ned Franks, as he stroked quietly the reddish brown coat of his little squirrel.
"But you're like to hear a great deal about it, a great deal more than you'd like to hear," cried Dan. "'Tis said all about that you've some bitter ill-will 'gainst the young master aboard the 'Queen,' and all his family too, and that you was angry at something that the lady said or did yesterday, and the gamekeeper saw you in the wood—and, of course, you was there for no good—and there's not a soul as doubts as you went there and smashed the glass out of spite."
"Some one has got up a fine story about me," said Ned, who more than suspected that the whole was his nephew's invention.
Bessy Peele looked alarmed. "I hope—I hope," she exclaimed, "that we're not agoing to get into another scrape with Lady Barton! Sir Lacy is a hard man, and never lets any one off; 'twould be a dreadful business, Ned, if you was to be sent to prison!"
Franks flushed indignantly, as if the very thought were an insult; but he only said, "There's little danger of that, Bessy, I never hove in sight of the house."
"How unlucky it was that you were in the park at all," began Dan, but his mother cut him short.
"What's the use, you simpleton, of saying a word about the park? Who need know that your uncle was there at all?"
"But the gamekeeper—"
"What of him?" interrupted Mrs. Peele. "He only guessed that he saw something like a sailor in the dusk, and even had he seen Ned as plainly as I do now, he's only one, and there's us three, you, I, and your uncle, as can say—and hold by it too, that he never stirred from that there chimney-corner from sunset to midnight!"
"Bessy!" exclaimed her brother, sternly.