"Halloa!" cried Sir Simon, in surprise. "What brings you here?"
He was a little round man, with a red, kind face, shaped not unlike the head of a codfish, and light hair that stuck up in a high point above his forehead: one of the most unpretending, outspeaking men ever known, who could not conceal that he had been "born nobody," imperfectly educated, and had made his fortune laboriously and honestly by the work of his hands. Now and then he burst out with these revelations before the schoolboys, to whom he was fond of declaring his sentiments, to the intense chagrin of Loftus major and the dancing delight of Dick. Sir Simon, an old bachelor, was very kind and good, hospitable to everybody, and making much of his nephews. He was fond of Albert Loftus, distinguishing the really good qualities of the boy's nature, though ridiculing his pride and self-assumption. "He'll get it taken out of him," Sir Simon would say: and to do the knight justice, he spared no opportunity of helping on the process of extermination.
Twitching at his grey garden coat, which caught, with the suddenness of his turning, in a beautiful shrub that bore white flowers, Sir Simon looked in his nephew's face: not quite so lofty a face as usual.
"What's the matter, Bertie? What's in that parcel?"
So Bertie Loftus had to explain: he had taken a brace of pistols to school, and the Doctor had despatched them back again. Sir Simon enjoyed the information immensely; that is the "despatching back" portion of it. He knew very little about pistols himself; could not remember, like Brown major, to have handled one in his life; and regarded them rather in the light of a dangerous animal that you were never sure of.
"I should have buried them in the ground, had I been the Doctor, instead of giving them back to you. You'll come to some mischief, Mr. Albert, if you meddle with edged tools."
"I'd as soon he had buried them, as sent me back with them in the face of the school," avowed Loftus, in his subdued spirit. Very subdued just now, for there was more behind. Too honourable not to tell the whole, he went on to disclose the calamity that the pistols had caused. Sir Simon was horror-struck.
"Albert! You have shot a boy?"
"It was that miserable Dick," returned Loftus, looking as chapfallen as it was possible for him, with his naturally proud face, to look. "I'm very sorry, of course; I'd rather have been shot myself. But it was not my fault, and Dick ought to be punished."
"No; you ought to be punished for taking the things to school," rebuked Sir Simon. "It would be punishment enough for my whole life, sir, if I had been the means of putting a fellow-creature's life in danger. Here, stop! Where are you going now?"