"I'm teachin' Devil to carry letters,—just as if he were a carrier-dove, you know." Here he chuckled. "You oughter have heard Flora Blair sing, 'Oh, carry these lines to my lady-love!'"
Leander raised his voice to a high squeak and shut his eyes languishingly as he mimicked the singer. He opened them again and continued:
"She said 'twas an old song, and, oh, wasn't it lovely? Her singin' that made me think of havin' Devil learn, you know. I tie a teenty bit of paper on his leg, and then—oh, I'll tell you all about it some time. Prue's helpin' me. She says it may come handy when one of us is shut up in a dungeon, you know. Don't you think so?"
Lawrence nodded. His mind was hardly following the boy's words now. There was creeping upon him a dull sense of dissatisfaction, he knew not why.
Leander prattled on, the words sounding confusedly in the still room. At last Lawrence's ears caught the sentence, "For Caro wouldn't let Lord Maxwell have the Vireo and take us all down to the Point of Rocks. She was as silly as she could be, but she wouldn't give in. When I asked her afterwards, she said the Vireo shouldn't go out till you were able to sail her."
Lawrence inwardly called himself childish because of the warm glow that came to his heart as he heard.
"Bless her! bless her!" he said to himself. "She cares for me."
In two days more the young man was down-stairs. He still moved rather stiffly, but his face was radiant as he sat on the piazza with Carolyn.
"We're going to have a long morning all by ourselves," said the girl, but she had scarcely spoken when two people came strolling along in the shrubbery at the left of the lawn.
Lawrence did not suppress an exclamation of impatience when Prudence came in sight, followed by a tall man whom Lawrence had not seen.