“Oh, I say,” cried Mike reproachfully—“you are getting to be a fellow! You thought the caves grand at first.”
“So I did, when we could go there and fish, and cook our tea, and eat it, and enjoy ourselves like Robinson Crusoe; but when it comes to finding the other cave and all that stuff there, it makes one uncomfortable like, and I don’t care so much about going.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but it seems queer, and as if we ought to tell my father or yours. I felt like you do at first, and it seemed as if we’d found a treasure and were going to be very rich.”
“So we have, and so we are,” said Mike. “I don’t see why you should turn cowardly about it.”
“I didn’t know that it was cowardly to want to be honest,” said Vince quietly.
“Only hark at him!” cried Mike, as the waves came thundering in, and the wind roared over them. “You are the most obstinate chap that ever was. Why won’t you see things in the right light? Don’t those things belong to my father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. If they were brought and hidden there a hundred years ago, and everybody who brought ’em is dead, as they’re on father’s land, mustn’t they be his?”
“Or the king’s.”