He’d just look a fool going back without boots and—nothing on earth would reconcile him to the idea of looking a fool in the eyes of that beautiful woman in blue.
“Dick,” he whispered to himself despondently, “Daredevil Dick!” (A more miserable-looking face you never set eyes on.) “It’s all up with your little schemes, Dick, my boy. You must get a bag—and nothing on earth will get you a bag.”
He paid little heed to the village through which he wandered. He knew there were no bags there. Chance rather than any volition of his own guided him down a side path that led to the nearly dry bed of a little rivulet, and there he sat down on some weedy grass under a group of willows. It was an untidy place that needed all the sunshine of the morning to be tolerable; one of those places where stinging nettles take heart and people throw old kettles, broken gallipots, jaded gravel, grass cuttings, rusty rubbish, old boots—.
For a time Bealby’s eyes rested on the objects with an entire lack of interest.
Then he was reminded of his not so very remote childhood when he had found an old boot and made it into a castle....
Presently he got up and walked across to the rubbish heap and surveyed its treasures with a quickened intelligence. He picked up a widowed boot and weighed it in his hand.
He dropped it abruptly, turned about and hurried back into the village street.
He had ideas, two ideas, one for the luggage and one for the boots.... If only he could manage it. Hope beat his great pinions in the heart of Bealby.
Sunday! The shops were shut. Yes, that was a fresh obstacle. He’d forgotten that.
The public-house stood bashfully open, the shy uninviting openness of Sunday morning before closing time, but public-houses, alas! at all hours are forbidden to little boys. And besides he wasn’t likely to get what he wanted in a public-house; he wanted a shop, a general shop. And here before him was the general shop—and its door ajar! His desire carried him over the threshold. The Sabbatical shutters made the place dark and cool, and the smell of bacon and cheese and chandleries, the very spirit of grocery, calm and unhurried, was cool and Sabbatical, too, as if it sat there for the day in its best clothes. And a pleasant woman was talking over the counter to a thin and worried one who carried a bundle.