"Yes," he said, smiling gravely, "you would be sorry. So you would be if Tommy got the measles, or the black cat opposite were to slip off the tiles and break its neck, or Giles came home sober enough one night to kill his wife. There! I've hurt you! I didn't mean to! It's sheer cussedness on my part, and I'm an ill-conditioned cur to say a word." Then suddenly the smile vanished, and his misery showed itself in his dark eyes. "Ah! can't you see what your going means to me—can't you see?" He caught his emotion by the throat and checked it. "That—that I shall miss you—and Dick; that I shan't have any one to come to with my cantata and my cough. There's Dick calling, and good-by. I—I shall be out at a music lesson when you start to-morrow."
He held her hand for a moment or two, half raised it slowly, but, with a wistful smile and a tightening of his lips, let it fall.
He was not out when they drove away next morning, but his door was closed, and he watched them from behind the ragged curtains drawn closely over the grimy window. Then, when the cab had rattled away, he went out on the landing and found Tommy seated on the stairs, bewailing his desertion, with his two chubby, sooty fists kneading his swollen eyes.
"Come inside, Tommy," he said. "Let us mingle our tears together. You ungrateful young sweep, how dare you cry! She kissed you!"
Nell, of the tender heart, had grown somewhat fond of Beaumont Buildings, and she sighed rather wistfully as she looked back at it, and thought of the humble friends who would, she knew, miss her; but her spirits rose as the train left the tops of the houses and carried Dick and her into the fresh air of the great Hampshire downs.
"It seems years, ages, since I saw the country!" she exclaimed. "Dick, do you see those sheep? They are white! Think of it! Think of the grimy ones in the parks! Couldn't we have a Society for Washing the Poor London Sheep, Dick? And look at that farmhouse! Oh, Dick, it isn't Devonshire and—and Shorne Mills, but it is the country at last!"
"All right; keep your hair on, young woman," said Dick, looking out of the window in a patronizing fashion. "This is all very well; but wait until you get to Anglemere. Then you can shout and carry on if you like. Old Bardsley—nice old chap when he steps off his perch—says it is one of the most delightful 'seats' in England; as if it were a kind of armchair! Lucky beggar, this young lord! Nell, I've a kind of feeling that I ought to have been the heldest son of an hearl, but that I was changed in the cradle, don't you know. I should advise you not to stick your head too far out of the window, or one of these tunnels will knock it off. A brainless sister I can bear with, but one without any head at all would be rather too much."
He was pretty jubilant himself, though, boylike, he tried to play the cynic; and when the ramshackle fly drove through the picturesque village, and they came in sight of a huge palace of a house which gleamed redly through the trees of an English park, and the flyman, pointing with his whip, informed them that it was Anglemere, Dick emitted a whistle of surprise and admiration.
"I say, that is something like! What signifies the Maltbys' and the other places we know, after that?"
But Nell's eyes, after a glance at the great house, were fixed upon the lodge at which the fly had stopped.