“Not you, Bob. Come over to-morrow.”
“What for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll go rabbiting or something.”
“Now, Bob!” came from the doctor.
“Here, I must go. Good-bye. I’ll come if I can. I wish I was you, or old Bigley, or somebody else.”
“Or back at school,” I said laughing.
“Yes, or back at school,” he said quite seriously; and then his arm was grasped by his father.
“Just as if I was a patient,” he grumbled to me next day. “Father don’t like me. He only thinks I am a nuisance, and he’s glad when I’m going back to school. I shall run off to Bristol some day and go to sea, that’s what I shall do.”
But that was the next day. That evening I stood with my father at the gate till Bob and his father were out of sight in the lane, and then we went back into the parlour, where my father lit his pipe and sat smoking and gazing at me.
“Well, Sep,” he said after a pause, “don’t you want to know how the mine is getting on?”