“Next time you go!” echoed Arthur. “Why, you don’t suppose that papa will let you go again?”
“Oh, yes, I do,” said Dick, yawning and speaking drowsily. “Because a chap falls off a horse once, nobody says he isn’t to ride any more. You’ll see: father will let me go. I don’t suppose—we should—should—what say?”
“I didn’t speak,” said Arthur haughtily. “There, go to sleep.”
“Go to sleep!” said Dick. “No—not bit sleepy. I—I’m—very comfortable, though, and—and—Ah!”
That last was a heavy sigh, and Arthur Temple lay listening to his brother’s deep regular breathing for some minutes, feeling bitter and hurt at all that had taken place that day, and as if he had been thrust into a very secondary place. Then he, too, dropped asleep, and he was still sleeping soundly when Dick awoke, to jump out of bed and pull up the blind, so that he could look out on the calm sea, which looked pearly and grey and rosy in the morning sunshine. Great patches of mist were floating here and there, hiding the luggers and shutting out headlands, and everywhere the shores looked so beautiful that the lad dressed hurriedly, donning an old suit of tweed, the flannels he had worn the day before being somewhere in the kitchen, where they were hung up to dry.
“I’d forgotten all about that,” said Dick to himself. “I wonder where Will Marion is, and whether he’d go for a bathe.”
Dick looked out on the calm sea, and wondered how anything could have been so awful looking as it seemed the night before.
“It must have been out there,” he thought, as he looked at the sun-lit bay, then at the engine-houses far up on the hills and near the cliff, and these set him thinking about his father’s mission in Cornwall.
“I wonder whether father will begin looking at the mines to-day!” he said to himself. “I should like to know what time it is! I wonder whether Will Marion is up yet, and—Hallo! what’s this?”
Dick had caught sight of something lying on the table beside his brother’s neat little dressing-case—a small leather affair containing brush, comb, pomatum, and scent-bottles, tooth-brushes, nail-brushes, and the usual paraphernalia used by gentlemen who shave, though Arthur Temple’s face was as smooth as that of a little girl of nine.