Craddock, laid his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Then there's our little private bargain," he said. "Tell your mother and that bathing boy, of course. But we'll not talk about it otherwise. Our little agreement, yours and mine. I don't think we shall either of us repent it."
"It won't be me who starts repenting," said Charles joyously.
[CHAPTER IV.]
Charles was in camp again at the little peninsula fringed with meadow-sweet and loosestrife below Thorley Weir, scarcely hearing, far less listening to its low thunder, diminished by the long continuance of the drought, scarcely seeing, far less looking at the dusky crimson behind the trees which showed where the sun had set. Probably his unconscious self, that never-resting observer and recorder of all the minutest unremembered incidents of life, saw and took note, but though his eyes were open and his ears alert, his conscious brain was busy with what concerned him more vividly than those things. Besides, in a way he had already made them his own; he had painted them half a dozen times in sketches and studies, he had guessed their secret, learned the magic of their romance, and they were his. All that was not his, all the life that was expanding and opening about him, could not but claim and receive this surrender of his brain and his heart.
He had come back here two days ago, and on the morning following, had presented his card at the Mill House to a parlour-maid who had taken it in, leaving him and the canvas easel and paint-box he had brought with him to grill at the door. This rather haughty young person returned after a while and bidding him follow, took him upstairs into what looked like a disused nursery, overlooking the lawn and river, and pointed at a picture propped against the end of a sofa.
"Mr. Wroughton hopes there is everything you require," she said, "and please to ring if you want anything."
She rustled out of the door, which she closed with elaborate precaution, exactly as if Charles had fallen into the sleep which was necessary for his recovery.
Charles' grave grey eyes had been twinkling with amusement, as he was thus led through an empty house, and stowed away like a leper, in this sequestered chamber, and, left alone, a broad grin spread over his face. Then before looking at the picture which stood with its face towards the end of the sofa, his eye made an observant tour of the room. Certainly it had been a nursery, for here stood a doll's house, here a child's crib, here a chair with a confining bar between the arms, so that no child imprisoned there could by any means escape. But there were signs of a later occupancy, a couple of big arm-chairs, and a revolving book-case stood there also, on the top of which evidently in recent use lay a writing-pad with ink-bottle and pen-tray attached. Also there was that indefinable sense in the air, manifest subtly but unmistakably that the room was still in use....