“No; only for a walk.”
“Over to the Hall?”
“Yes, Samson,” replied the lad, impatiently. “Then, if you see that bad brother o’ mine, Master Fred, don’t you speak to him. I’m getting ashamed of him.”
“No: he’s getting ashamed of you, Sam,” cried Fred, tauntingly. “What?”
“Well, he said so last night.”
“Ashamed of me, sir. I should like to see him be ’shamed of me. I’d give him something to be ’shamed about.”
“Oh yes, of course,” cried Fred; and he ran on, forgetting all about the gardener in his eagerness to get to the lake.
The birds were twittering and singing in the woods and coppices, the soft, silvery mists were rising from the hollow, and each broad fern frond glistened as if set with tiny jewels of every prismatic hue. Away too in the distance, as he topped a hill, one corner of the Hall lake could be seen glistening like burnished silver set in a frame of vivid green.
But these were too common objects to take the boy’s attention as he walked up the hill slope and trotted down the other side, for he was intent upon one thing only, a faint indication of which was given by his exclaiming once—
“How surprised old Scar will be!”