"No!" thundered out the lad, with a furious look. "I don't want your dinner, sir; I would have stayed, because your son asked me, and he was civil to me, and I liked him. Now I think I had better go. Good day, sir."
There is a verse in a very old Book—even in its human histories the most pathetic of all books—which runs thus:
"And it came to pass when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit unto the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."
And this day, I, a poorer and more helpless Jonathan, had found my David.
I caught him by the hand, and would not let him go.
"There, get in, lads—make no more ado," said Abel Fletcher, sharply, as he disappeared.
So, still holding my David fast, I brought him into my father's house.
CHAPTER II
Dinner was over; my father and I took ours in the large parlour, where the stiff, high-backed chairs eyed one another in opposite rows across the wide oaken floor, shiny and hard as marble, and slippery as glass. Except the table, the sideboard and the cuckoo clock, there was no other furniture.