“Yes, you are. Your father said he should send you.”
“If he does I shall run away, so there,” cried the boy.
Sydney turned away, and walked through the garden, his head bent, his brow wrinkled, and his mind so busily occupied, that he hardly heeded which way he went.
“If his father sends him he shall run away.”
Those words kept on repeating themselves in Sydney’s brain like some jingle, and he found himself thinking of them more and more as he passed through the gate, and went along the road that late autumn morning, kicking up the dead leaves which lay clustering beneath the trees.
“If his father sends him to sea he shall run away,” said Sydney to himself; and then he thought of how Pan Strake would be free, and have no more boots and shoes or knives to clean, and not have to go into the garden to weed the paths.
Then by a natural course he found himself thinking that if he, Sydney Belton, were to leave home, he would escape being sent to sea—at all events back to school—and he too would be free.
With a boy’s wilful obstinacy, he carefully drew a veil over all the good, and dragged out into the mental light all that he looked upon as bad in his every-day life, satisfied himself that he was ill-used, and wished that he had had a mother living to, as he called it, take his part.
“I wonder what running away would be like?” he thought. “There would be no Uncle Tom to come and bully and bother me, and father wouldn’t be there to take his side against me. I wonder what one could do if one ran away?”
“Morning!”