Dexter was at his side in a moment, had thrust his hand in the doctor’s, and then fled from the room.
“Want to show him we’ve full confidence in him again. Bah, no! That boy couldn’t look you in the face and tell you a lie. My dear Helen, I’m as certain of my theory being correct as of anything in the world. But hang that Limpney for a narrow-minded, classic-stuffed, mathematic-bristling prig! We’ll have a better.”
Dexter felt a strange hesitancy; but the doctor evidently wished him to go and fish, so he took his rod, line, and basket, and was crossing the hall when he encountered Mrs Millett.
“It was very nice of you, my dear, and I’m sure it will do you good. You did take it all now, didn’t you?”
“Yes, every drop,” said Dexter, smiling; and the old lady went away evidently highly gratified.
Old Dan’l was busy tidying up a flower-bed as he reached the lawn, and, to Dexter’s astonishment, he nodded and gave him another of his cast-iron smiles.
Further down the garden Peter was at work.
“Dig you up a few worms, Master Dexter? Course I will. Come round to the back of the old frames.”
A curious sensation of choking troubled Dexter for a few moments, but it passed off, and in a short time he was furnished with a bag of red worms, and walking down to the river he sat down and began to fish with his mind going back to the night of his running away, and he seemed to see it all again; the undressing, the hesitation, and the cold plunge after his clothes, and all the rest of the miserable dreary time which had proved so different from what he had pictured in his mind.
Peter had said that the fish would “bite like fun at them worms.”