"So did mine," said Ned softly.
There was a pause in which the luring wail of a circling plover who deemed the intruders too near her nest, became insistent, and seemed to fill the mountain solitude with a sense of motherhood, until, once more, the musical, critical laugh struck in on it.
"'Come!' as Shakespeare says, 'there's sympathy for you!' So far we start fair. Education?--I was at Eton, and----"
"I was a Blue-Coat boy," interrupted Ted again, and something in his tone made Ned look the other way, and idly busy himself in trying to dissociate a tender trail of ivy-leaved mountain campanula from its coarser companions in the turf.
"A better education, I expect," he said at last, "though I admit the yellow stockings must be devilish; still"--he paused, settled himself yet more comfortably in his cleft, and with clasped hands behind his head, relapsed into smoke and silence. Even the plover, convinced of their innocence, had ceased her wheeling, luring wail.
So desultorily, sometimes in thought only, sometimes by question and answer, they sat trying to dissociate themselves from the tie of a common name. And before them the afternoon sun, slowly sinking towards extinction in the sea, began to send level rays of light to fill up the valley with a golden haze in which all things lost their individuality.
Finally Ned sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"About equal, I should say; except, of course, for money."
"That means we are unequal in all things," remarked Ted shortly. "You can't deny it. A clerk as I am, out for a Whitsun holiday with ten pounds to spend on it in his pocket, isn't--isn't in the same week with--well! what shall I say----"
"A man who employs clerks," suggested Ned with a smile.