“Yes, I suppose you ought; but let’s wait a bit first.”
“Well, we might wait a little while. I say, Fred, what cowards we were!”
“But it was so dark, and I couldn’t help thinking that we might never find our way out.”
“Yes; that’s just how I felt, and as if something was coming after us out of the darkness.”
“And, of course, there couldn’t be anything. You could see by the dust on the steps that nobody had been there for years and years.”
There was a long silence here, during which the two lads looked out at the garden flooded with sunshine, where Nat was working very deliberately close by the sun-dial. And beyond him, at the lake, from which the sunbeams flashed whenever a fish or water-fowl disturbed the surface.
“I say,” said Fred at last, “don’t let’s sit here any longer. You’re as dull as if you had no tongue. What are you thinking about now?”
“I was wondering whether I shall be such a coward when I grow up to be a man.”
“I say, Scar, don’t keep on talking like that; it’s just as if you kept on calling me a coward too.”
“So you were.”