“I can’t go and bother my mother about such a thing as that,” he mused. “I ought to be old enough now to be able to decide which is right and which is wrong. Drew thinks and talks like a man, while it seems to me that I’m almost a child compared to him.
“Well, let’s try. Ought I to go, or ought I not? There can’t be any harm to me in going. There may be some friends of Drew’s whom I shan’t like; but if there are I needn’t go again. It’s childish, when I want to become more manly, to shrink from going into society, like a great girl.—I’ll go. If there’s any harm in it, the harm is likely to be to Drew, and—yes, of course; I could save him from getting into trouble.
“Then I ought to go,” he said to himself decisively, and he felt at ease, troubling himself little more about the matter, but going through his extremely easy duties of waiting in the anteroom, bearing letters and messages from one part of the Palace to the other, and generally looking courtly as a royal page.
Then the Monday came, with Andrew Forbes in the highest of spirits, and ready to chat about the country, his friend’s life at Winchester, and to make plans for running down to see them when his father and mother went out of town.
“I don’t believe you’d like it if you did come,” said Frank.
“Oh yes, I should. Why not?”
“Because you’d find some of the lanes muddy, and the edges of the roads full of brambles. You wouldn’t care to see the bird’s and squirrels and hedgehogs, nor the fish in the river, nor the rabbits and hares.”
“Why, those are all things that I am dying to see in their natural places. I wish you would not think I am such a macaroni. Why, after the way in which you have gone on about the country, isn’t it natural that I should want to see more of it?”
He kept on in this strain to such an extent that, instead of convincing his companion, he overdid it, and set him wondering.
“I don’t understand him a bit,” he said to himself; “and I wish he wouldn’t keep on calling me my dear fellow and slapping me on the back. I never saw him so wild and excitable before.”