'Such a lovely animal you never saw,' said Lance, swinging himself downstairs. 'You must walk out and see it, Fee, for you'll have it in the Pursuivant some Saturday.'
'Lance, I am very sorry,' said Felix, standing upright, with his back to the exhausted grate. 'Just attend to me, both of you.'
'Oh!' said Lance, hastily, 'I know there's a lot of old women's gossip about Collis; but nobody minds such stuff. Harry is as good a lad as ever stepped; and there was no harm to be seen about the place;—was there, Ful?'
'The old Frog has been croaking,' hoarsely muttered Fulbert.
Boys of sixteen and fourteen were incapable of coercion by a youth of one-and-twenty, and the only appeal must be to conscience and reason; so Felix went on speaking, though he had seen from the first that Fulbert's antagonism rendered him stolid, deaf, and blind; and Lancelot's flushed cheeks, angry eyes, impatient attempts to interrupt, and scornful gestures told of scarcely-repressed passion.
'You may have seen no harm, I find no fault' (Fulbert scowled); 'but if I had known what I do now I should not have let you go to-day. My father would rather have cut off his right hand than have allowed you to begin an acquaintance which has been ruinous to almost all the young men who have been in that set.'
'But we are not young men,' cried Lance; 'it is only for the holidays; and we only want a little fun with poor Harry, he is so lonely—and just to go out rabbiting and skating. It is very hard we can't be let alone the first time anything worth doing has turned up in this abominable slow place.'
'It is very hard, Lance. No one is more concerned than I; but if this intimacy once begins, there is no guessing where it will lead; and I do not speak without grounds. Listen—'
'If it comes from old Frog, you may as well shut up,' said Lance. 'There's been no peace at Marshlands since he took that cottage—a regular old nuisance and mischief-maker, spiting the Captain because one of the dogs killed his old cock, and bothering Charlie to no end about him.'
'I have heard from others as well,' said Felix; and he briefly mentioned some facts as to the scandals of the dissipated household, some of the imputations under which Captain Collis lay, and named two or three of the young men whose unsatisfactory conduct was ascribed to his influence.