“She’s only going in her fifteen, ma’am, but she’s very big.”
“Oh, well, Bessie Lee and Grace Elton are sixteen, quite. Yes, tell her to come.”
“Thank you, ma’am, I will,” said Wyn. “Do you want to go home, sir?”
“Yes, I’m tired this morning. Go straight back. I don’t want to go round the wood.”
He fell into silence. Geraldine played with her puppy, and Wyn trudged cheerily at the pony’s head, thinking of an expedition he wanted to propose some day when Mr Edgar was very well and fresh, and there was no one to interfere with them. Mr Edgar had been so weak all the spring, and had had so many headaches and fits of palpitation—once he had even fainted after an attempt to walk a few steps farther than usual—so that he and Wyn had not been trusted to make long excursions alone together.
But now that he was better again, and the weather was so fine, Wyn longed to take Dobbles to a certain spot recently laid open to his approach. He had been thoroughly imbued with his young master’s tastes, knew the haunts of every bird and beast in the wood, every hollow in the old ash-trees where owls or squirrels could nest and haunt. He watched the growth of all the wild flowers, and at the autumn cottage show intended to win the first prize for a collection of them—a new idea in Ashcroft which had been recently suggested by a lady whose husband, Sir Philip Carleton, had just taken Ravenshurst for the shooting.