“So could I,” Hugh answered thoughtfully.
“Well, for all that you are not to treat me like a boy as the other men do; you’re nothing but a lad yourself.”
Hugh laughed, and put his hand down on Frank’s shoulder. “We’ll be good comrades as we ever have been,” he said. “I shall never forget how kindly you have used me this day.”
“Oh, hang all that!” Frank put in hastily. “You’d do the like for me. And ’tis pleasure for me to have you with me. You can share my chamber,—there’s space enough for one to be lonesome,—and we’ll go to the wars together, eh?”
The realization of part of the boyish plan he had brought with him from Everscombe pleased Hugh gravely, but he had been too often disappointed to clutch eagerly at any hope, so he only said, “I’d like it right well,—if your father wish me to stay.”
“If I wish it, he will,” Frank answered confidently, and so they went arm in arm down the stairs.
Large as the house was, Sir William and the officers of his troop contrived to fill it only too full, Hugh concluded, after Frank had haled him, to his great embarrassment, into several rooms, and presented him formally to all the men on whom he could lay hands. Of the number he best remembered a dry-spoken Captain Turner, who told him, with an implication that made Hugh’s face redden, that he ought in justice to notify the rebels that he had joined the king. He remembered, too, a long-legged Cornet Griffith, whose boyish face at sight of him took on such a rueful look that Hugh suspected the loan of the gray clothes had been a forced one. He ventured a private expostulation to Frank, who merely laughed: “Oh, Ned Griffith is a cousin of mine, so he ought to be glad to lend me his goods.—And here I have found my father out at last.”
With that he dragged Hugh by the sleeve into a retired parlor, where Sir William Pleydall, a stout florid man of near sixty, was sitting at a table dictating to a secretary. “Here is Hugh Gwyeth, sir, of whom Colonel Gwyeth’s corporal told you,” Frank announced. “You’ll entertain him as a gentleman volunteer, will you not, sir?”
“Will you be silent, Francis, till I have done with this piece of work?” Sir William burst out.
Frank knelt down on a chair with his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands, so the candlelight fell across his girlishly fair face. “I am right sorry, sir,” he began winningly, “I did not mark you were busied. I had thought—you would gladly aid a friend of mine. Have I offended you greatly, sir?”