“If you like,” said Kenrick, who was, I am sorry to say, not a little jealous of the friendship which had sprung up between Power and Walter.
“And would you mind Daubeny joining us?”
“Not at all; and he’s clearly overworking himself. It’ll do him good. Let me see—you, Power, Flip, Dubbs, and me; that’ll be enough, won’t it?”
“Well, I should like to ask Eden.”
“Eden!” said Kenrick with the least little touch of contempt in his tone of voice.
“Poor little fellow,” said Walter smiling sadly; “so you, too, despise him. No wonder he doesn’t get on.”
“O! let him come by all means, if you like,” said Kenrick.
“Thanks, Ken—but now I come to think of it, it’s too far for him. Never mind; let’s go before dinner, and order some sandwiches for to-morrow, and forage generally, at Cole’s.”
Power and Daubeny gladly consented to join the excursion. At tea, Walter asked Henderson if he’d come with them, and he, being just then in a phase of nonsense which made him speak of everything in a manner intended to be Homeric, answered with oracular gravity—
“Him addressed in reply the laughter-loving son of Hender:
Thou askest me, oh Evïdës, like to the immortals,
Whether thee I will accompany, and the much-enduring Dubbs,
And the counsellor Power, and the revered ox-eyed Kenrick,
To the tops of thousand-crested many-fountained Appenfell.”