Mr. Burroughs read the slip with some surprise.
"Of course, Tom," he said, "if your father wishes you to have a holiday, I shall not refuse permission; but I understood that he wished you to remain steadily at school until vacation time."
"May I go?" queried the boy hastily, not caring to discuss the question.
Mr. Burroughs bowed, but laid the slip of paper in his desk. Tommy, not lingering for further debate, sped from the room; and when he reached the place in the next street, where, under Dame Curran's rosebush, he had hidden his sketch-book, he threw his cap high in air from sheer joy of springtime and freedom.
Out from the town he hurried, and soon was tramping through the forest that furnished the banks of the winding river Stour. All day long he revelled in the glory of the woods, and hour after hour he worked with his pencil, striving to put into his book the charming bits of landscape that greeted his eye on every side. One sketch comprised a bend in the river, with grassy meads beyond; another, an old vine-covered bridge, now fallen into disuse; a third merely pictured a broken tree lying across the sunlit path.
Occasionally he experienced a sharp twinge somewhere when he remembered that all this pleasure was stolen. "But then," he argued, "what difference does it make? Old Burroughs didn't know, and father will never find it out!"
He stifled these pricking thoughts as fast as they arose, not permitting them seriously to disturb his holiday. He whistled, he sang, he lay on his back and looked up at the sky through the chinks in the tender foliage. Sometimes he closed his eyes and listened, and the mysterious woodland sounds, mingled with the purling of the river, yielded him boundless enjoyment. When, however, the shadows of the trees fell at a certain angle, Tommy closed his sketch-book with a sigh and went swiftly homeward.
"I must get there at the usual time," he meditated, "else they'll ask me where I've been."
As he came in sight of the "Black Horse," the public inn of bygone times, where armored knights had claimed food and shelter, but which was now the comfortable residence of John Gainsborough, Tommy began to whistle airily.
Approaching nearer, he discovered that his father had come with pipe and chair to the front stoop, and was sitting with his face turned down the street, as though watching for somebody.