Just at that moment Jem was sitting on an empty cask, eating his bread and butter, and watching a boat manned by blue-jackets going off to the sloop of war lying out toward the channel, and flying her colours in the evening breeze.
“Poor little Sally!” he said to himself. “We don’t seem to get on somehow, and I’m afraid I’m a bit rough to her; but knives and scissors! What a temper she have got.”
Meanwhile, in anything but a pleasant frame of mind, Don had gone home to find that the tea was ready, and that he was being treated as a laggard.
“Come, Lindon,” said his uncle quietly, “you have kept us waiting some time.”
The lad glanced quickly round the well-furnished room, bright with curiosities brought in many a voyage from the west, and with the poison of Mike’s words still at work, he wondered how much of what he saw rightfully belonged to him.
The next moment his eyes lit on the soft sweet troubled face of his mother, full of appeal and reproach, and it seemed to Don that his uncle had been upsetting her by an account of his delinquencies.
“It’s top bad, and I don’t deserve it,” he said to himself. “Everything seems to go wrong now. Well, what are you looking at?” he added, to himself, as he took his seat and stared across at his cousin, the playmate of many years, whose quiet little womanly face seemed to repeat her father’s grave, reproachful look, but who, as it were, snatched her eyes away as soon as she met his gaze.
“They all hate me,” thought Don, who was in that unhappy stage of a boy’s life when help is so much needed to keep him from turning down one of the dark side lanes of the great main route.
“Been for a walk, Don?” said his mother with a tender look.
“No, mother, I only stopped back in the yard a little while.”