As the boys were slowly coming up the lane, towards the house, they saw Mary and Lucy in the garden. They went round into the garden to see what they were doing.
They found them seated upon a bench in a pleasant part of the garden; it was the same bench were Rollo had once undertaken to establish a hive of bees. Mary was teaching Lucy how to draw pictures upon lilac leaves, and other leaves which they gathered, here and there, in the garden.
The boys came up and asked to see what the girls were doing. The girls did not say to them, as girls sometimes do in such cases, ‘It is none of your concern,—you go off out of the garden, we don’t want you here.’ They very politely showed them their leaf sketches,—and the boys, at the same time, with equal politeness, offered them some of their raspberries. In the course of the conversation, as they sat and stood there, Rollo said to his sister,
“Henry lost my fish, Mary, and ought he not to pay me?”
“Your fish?” asked Mary.
“Yes,” said Rollo, “I caught a fish in a dipper.”
“And how came Henry to have it?”
“O, I let him have it, to catch another. He made me.”
Henry had some secret feeling that he had not done quite right in the transaction, though he did not know exactly how he had done wrong. He did not make any reply to Rollo’s charge, but stood back, looking somewhat confused.
“Ought he not to pay me?” repeated Rollo.