The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes fixed on his companion.
'You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,' said Robert, smiling faintly; adding hurriedly as the boy's face resumed its ordinary expression: 'But some day, Ned, I shall go for good. I don't know whether you've been depending on me—you and some of the others. I think perhaps you have. If so, don't depend on me, Ned, any more! It must all come to an end—everything must—everything!—except the struggle to be a man in the world, and not a beast—to make one's heart clean and soft, and not hard and vile. That is the one thing that matters, and lasts. Ah, never forget that, Ned! Never forget it!'
He stood still, towering over the slouching thick-set form beside him, his pale intensity of look giving a rare dignity and beauty to the face which owed so little of its attractiveness to comeliness of feature. He had the makings of a true shepherd of men, and his mind as he spoke was crossed by a hundred different currents of feeling—bitterness, pain, and yearning unspeakable. No man could feel the wrench that lay before him more than he.
Ned Irwin said not a word. His heavy lids were dropped over his deep-set eye; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling with his butterfly net—awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irresponsiveness, in his whole attitude.
Robert gathered himself together.
'Well, good-night, my lad,' he said with a change of tone. 'Good luck to you; be off to your tea!'
And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short burnt August grass in the direction of the Murewell woods, which rose in a blue haze of heat against the slumberous afternoon sky. He had not gone a hundred yards before he heard a clattering after him. He stopped, and Ned came up with him.
'They're heavy, them things,' said the boy, desperately blurting it out, and pointing, with heaving chest and panting breath, to the rod and basket. 'I am going that way, I can leave un at the rectory.'
Robert's eyes gleamed.