“Dick, you old rascal, if you ever give so much trouble again I will wring your neck,” the boy said severely, whereat the black bird cocked his eye and seemed to chuckle silently over the manifest untruth of such a threat.
There followed a little pause in their talk as they moved onward up the slope with Dobbin’s great feet rustling in the high weeds and his long shadow slipping so quietly ahead of them across the grass. The dropping sunlight was falling on David’s uncovered head and turning it from red-brown to coppery gold. They reached the crest of the slope where an opening in the trees afforded a wide view of that same stretch of valley across which Betsey had sat gazing that day she was caught by the shower before her first visit to Miss Miranda. Here, without a word of bidding the big horse came to a stop. David laughed, and laid an affectionate hand on his neck.
“Dobbin always knows where I like to stand and look over the valley,” he said. “We stop here so often that now he never goes by. I like to look at those college towers and wonder how I can go there some day.”
“Oh, are you going there?” cried Betsey with an excited wriggle that nearly unseated her; “so am I—if nothing happens.”
She thought of the geometrical and historical difficulties in the way and sighed.
“A great deal will have to happen before I get there,” David remarked light-heartedly, “but I mean to manage it somehow. Perhaps only Dobbin knows how much I think about it while I work here in my uncle’s fields.”
“Is that your uncle’s house?” questioned Betsey, looking up at the big chimneys above the trees.
“Yes, and all this land is his, up to Somerset Lane. He is away a great deal and expects me rather to keep an eye on things, but of course I work on the farm too. There is really almost no one else to do it with all the labor crowding into the cities. I try to study by myself at night but—I don’t get very far. There are some places where I think I will stick forever.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Betsey, suddenly seeing the explanation of that puzzling page that had fallen into her hands the night David’s papers blew away, “do you find it hard to prove what is the volume of the frustum of a pyramid?”
“Do I?” returned David from the bottom of his heart. His freckled face crinkled into a delighted grin as he looked up at her. “Don’t tell me that there is some one else who finds it as mysterious as I do! ‘The frustum of a pyramid is equal to three other pyramids,’ I can get that far and I can even understand the first one, but the second is almost too much for me, and the third is quite impossible.”