“Well, you ought to be. Take hold and keep me company, else I shall be ashamed of my healthy appetite.”
With merry talk and gay jokes he beguiled Freeman out of his despondent mood, and presently the little fellow found himself eating and drinking, and felt much the better for it. When the meal was finished, Clark threw himself down on the grass, and again a silence fell between the two. Clark was wondering how he could win his cousin’s confidence, and Freeman had fallen again into troubled thought.
“Ray, you don’t look happy,” said Clark, suddenly.
“Happy!” echoed the other, “I’m too miserable to live.”
“Can’t you tell me all about it, Ray?” said Clark, in a voice so full of sympathy, that, in spite of himself, Ray’s eyes filled with tears, but he choked them back.
“I’ve nothing to tell,” he said, coldly.
Silence again, and once again Clark broke it.
“Ray,” he said, “do you remember your father?”
Freeman looked up in surprise at the question.
“Yes, I remember him well,” he said. “I was eight, you know, when he died. Oh, Stanley, I wish my father had lived. I believe I’d be a better fellow to-day, if he had.”