'I am sure papa would be very much vexed,' added she, conclusively.
'I believe it was luckless Hal that the mill-wheel tore in your nursery rhymes, eh, Daisy,' said Aubrey.
'Nursery rhymes, indeed!' returned the offended young lady; 'you know it is a very wicked place, and papa would be very angry at your going there.' She looked at Ethel, extremely shocked at her not having interfered, and disregarding all signs to keep silence.
'Axworthy—worthy of the axe,' said Aubrey, well pleased to retort a little teasing by the way; 'young Axworthy baiting the trap, and old Axworthy sitting up in his den to grind the unwary limb from limb!'
'Ethel, why don't you tell him not?' exclaimed Gertrude.
'Because he knows papa's wishes as well as I do,' said Ethel; 'and it is to them that he must attend, not to you or me.'
Aubrey muttered something about his father having said nothing to him; and Ethel succeeded in preventing Daisy from resenting this answer. She herself hoped to catch him in private, but he easily contrived to baffle this attempt, and was soon marching out of Stoneborough in a state of rampant independence, manhood, and resolute friendship, which nevertheless chose the way where he was least likely to encounter a little brown brougham.
Otherwise he might have reckoned three and a half miles of ploughed field, soppy lane, and water meadow, as more than equivalent to five miles of good turnpike road.
Be that as it might, he was extremely glad when, after forcing his way through a sticky clayey path through a hazel copse, his eye fell on a wide reach of meadow land, the railroad making a hard line across it at one end, and in the midst, about half a mile off, the river meandering like a blue ribbon lying loosely across the green flat, the handsome buildings of the Vintry Mill lying in its embrace.
Aubrey knew the outward aspect of the place, for the foreman at the mill was a frequent patient of his father's, and he had often waited in the old gig at the cottage door at no great distance; but he looked with more critical eyes at the home of his friend.