Hugh loved his uncle already, as if he had always known him. He put his arms round his neck, and whispered in his ear what he was thinking of;—his mother’s saying that God could and would, if He was sought, put the spirit of a man into the feeblest child.
“True!—quite true! I am very glad you know that, my boy. That will help you to learn at Crofton, though it is better than anything they can teach you in their school-room.”
Mrs Shaw and Phil looked curious; but Mr Shaw did not repeat a word of what Hugh had said. He put the boy away from his knees, because he heard the gig coming round.
Mrs Shaw told Hugh that she hoped he would spend some of his Sundays with his uncle and her; and his uncle added that he must come on holidays as well as Sundays,—there was so much to see about the mill.
Phil was amused, and somewhat pleased, to find how exactly Hugh remembered his description of the place and neighbourhood. He recognised the duck-pond under the hedge by the road-side, with the very finest blackberries growing above it, just out of reach. The church he knew, of course, and the row of chestnuts, whose leaves were just beginning to fall; and the high wall dividing the orchard from the playground. That must have been the wall on which Mr Tooke’s little boy used to be placed to frighten him. It did not look so very high as Hugh had fancied it. One thing which he had never seen or heard of was the bell, under its little roof on the ridge of Mr Tooke’s great house. Was it to call in the boys to school, or for an alarm? His uncle told him it might serve the one purpose in the day, and the other by night; and that almost every large farm thereabouts had such a bell on the top of the house.
The sun was near its setting when they came in sight of the Crofton house. A long range of windows glittered in the yellow light, and Phil said that the lower row all belonged to the school-room;—that whole row.
In the midst of his explanations Phil stopped, and his manner grew more rough than ever—with a sort of shyness in it too. It was because some of the boys were within hearing, leaning over the pales which separated the playground from the road.
“I say; hollo there!” cried one. “Is that Prater you have got with you?”
“Prater the second,” cried another. “He could not have had his name if there had not been Prater the first.”
“There! There’s a scrape you have got me into already!” muttered Phil.