Maggie turned quite pale. “Oh, Tom, why didn’t you ask me?”
“I wasn’t going to ask you for a bit, you greedy. You might have thought of it without, when you knew I gave you the best bit.”
“But I wanted you to have it; you know I did,” said Maggie, in an injured tone.
“Yes, but I wasn’t going to do what wasn’t fair. If I go halves, I’ll go ’em fair; only I wouldn’t be a greedy.”
With this cutting innuendo, Tom jumped down from his bough, and threw a stone with a “hoigh!” as a friendly attention to Yap, who had also been looking on while the eatables vanished, with an agitation of his ears and feelings which could hardly have been without bitterness. Yet the excellent dog accepted Tom’s attention with as much alacrity as if he had been treated quite generously.
But Maggie, gifted with that superior power of misery which distinguishes the human being, and places him at a proud distance from the most melancholy chimpanzee, sat still on her bough, and gave herself up to the keen sense of unmerited reproach. She would have given the world not to have eaten all her puff, and to have saved some of it for Tom. Not but that the puff was very nice, for Maggie’s palate was not at all obtuse, but she would have gone without it many times over, sooner than Tom should call her greedy and be cross with her. And he had said he wouldn’t have it, and she ate it without thinking; how could she help it? The tears flowed so plentifully that Maggie saw nothing around her for the next ten minutes; but by that time resentment began to give way to the desire of reconciliation, and she jumped from her bough to look for Tom. He was no longer in the paddock behind the rickyard; where was he likely to be gone, and Yap with him? Maggie ran to the high bank against the great holly tree, where she could see far away toward the Floss.
There was Tom; but her heart sank again as she saw how far he was on his way to the great river, and that he had another companion besides Yap,—naughty Bob Jakin, whose official, if not natural, function of frightening the birds was just now at a standstill.
Well! there was no hope for it; he was gone now, and Maggie could think of no comfort but to sit down by the hollow, or wander by the hedgerow, and fancy it was all different, refashioning her little world into just what she should like it to be.