"You'll come back soon--very soon--Uncle Dick?"
"Yes, I'll come back, my Imp."
And thus it was we parted, the Imp and I, beneath the "blasted oak," and I know my heart was strangely heavy as I turned away and left him.
After I had gone some distance I paused to look back. He still stood where I had left him, but his face was hidden in his arms as he leaned sobbing against the twisted trunk of the great tree.
All the way to the Three Jolly Anglers and during the rest of the evening the thought of the little desolate figure haunted me, so much so that, having sent away my dinner untasted, I took pen and ink and wrote him a letter, enclosing with it my penknife, which I had often seen him regard with "the eye of desire," despite the blade he had broken upon a certain memorable occasion. This done, I became possessed of a determination to send some message to Lisbeth also--just a few brief words which should yet reveal to her something of the thoughts I bore her ere I passed out of her life for ever.
For over an hour I sat there, chewing the stem of my useless pipe and racking my brain, but the "few brief words" obstinately refused to come.
Nine o'clock chimed mournfully from the Norman tower of the church hard by, yet still my pen was idle and the paper before me blank; also I became conscious of a tapping somewhere close at hand, now stopping, now beginning again, whose wearisome iteration so irritated my fractious nerves that I flung down my pen and rose.
The noise seemed to come from the vicinity of the window. Crossing to it, therefore, I flung the casement suddenly open, and found myself staring into a round face, in which were set two very round eyes and a button of a nose, the whole surmounted by a shock of red hair.
"'Allo, Mr. Uncle Dick!"
It needed but this and a second glance at the round face to assure me that it pertained to Ben, the gardener's boy.