"'Twas neatly placed!" said Pegleg.
"I'm surprised at you!" said Sharon later to the panting apprentice. "I'm surprised and grieved! You boys mixing it here every day for weeks and never letting on!"
"I never thought you'd like it," said Wilbur.
"Like it!" said Sharon. He said it unctuously. "And say, don't you let on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you. I ain't wanting that to get out on me."
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.
"I've reasoned with the boy from time to time," he confessed, gloomily, "but he's self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight and all that. I don't know—mebbe I haven't taken just the right tack with him yet."
Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner. She believed that he feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.
"His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him," she told Sharon. "If only we could get him into something where he could hold his head up."
"He does that too much now," began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped, floundering. "I mean he ain't enough ashamed," he concluded feebly, and feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the First National Bank.