“No—catch us wasting money that way! Danny made me those.”
“Oh—that big lout from over at the next farm?”
The gunpowder stored beneath Robin’s red thatch exploded suddenly. Barry, had he not been somewhat overwhelmed by the concussion, might have congratulated himself on having drawn blood at last.
“Don’t you talk like that!” she said, sharply. “I’ve got to be polite to you, ’cause your mother and father are so nice, but if you think you can sneer at our friends you’re jolly well mistaken, Mr. Barry Lane! Danny a lout, indeed! Danny’s got more sense in his little finger than you, or any other town boy, have in your whole body! He could show you the way about everything that really matters, only he wouldn’t be seen wasting his time over you!” She whirled past him, scarlet with anger, and left him to digest her words.
“Whew-w!” whistled Barry. “I put my foot well in that time, didn’t I?” His dark skin had flushed hotly. “Scissors, can’t she flare up! And all over that big farm-chap. He looks a lout, anyhow. But I suppose, living in the country, she doesn’t notice it.” He pondered the matter rather uneasily, realizing, somewhat to his own disgust, that he had transgressed his own code. When you were staying with people you did not abuse their friends. Apparently, that was what he had done.
He strolled round to the front of the house, disconsolately. Dinner was over: before him stretched a long and lonely afternoon. The mail, arriving in the middle of the day, had brought with it a request to Dr. Lane for a paper on some abstruse medical subject for a learned society: the doctor, groaning heavily, had shut himself up in his room, to write until evening. Barry was left to his own resources, and at the moment they seemed to him insufficient.
Mrs. Lane was on her couch. The injury to her ankle was a week old, but she declared that the joint still needed rest, although, to the unprejudiced eye, it looked much like the other. She greeted her son with a quick little smile. He sat down on the edge of the veranda near her.
“Bored, Barry-boy?”
“Oh, no. I’ll go fishing, I think.”
“Then what is wrong?”