“Hear! hear!” cried Captain Belton; and Sydney sat feeling more guilty than ever he had felt in his life.
For his brain was full of thoughts that he dared not have laid bare, and his inclination was trying to drag down the balance in which he felt that he hung.
As he sat there holding on tightly by the nut-crackers that he had not used, he felt as if he should have to answer all manner of questions directly, and be put through a terrible ordeal; but to his intense relief, the conversation turned upon an expedition to Portobello, and the way in which certain ships had been handled, the unfortunate officers in command not having done their duty to the satisfaction of the admiral. And as this argument seemed to grow more exciting the boy softly slipped from his chair and went out again to his place of meditation—the garden.
“Shall I—shan’t I?” he said to himself. Should he make a bold dash, and go off like heroes he had read of before, seeking his fortune anywhere?
He was quite ready to do this, but in a misty way it seemed to him that there would be no fortune to be found; and in addition, it would be going in direct opposition to his father’s and uncle’s wishes, and they would never forgive him.
“No,” he said, as he walked up and down the broad walk nearest the road, “I must give up and go to sea.”
But even as he said this softly, he felt so much on the balance, that he knew that a very little would send him away.
That very little came unexpectedly, for as he walked on down the garden in the darkness, where the short sturdy oak-trees sent their branches over the path on one side, and overhung the road on the other, a voice whispered his name—
“Master Syd!”
“Yes. What is it?”