Miss Lilly and Ferdy spent a quiet hour or two together after Christine and her mother had set off. Then, as it was really a half-holiday, and Miss Lilly usually went home immediately after luncheon on half-holidays, she said good-bye to Ferdy, after seeing him comfortably settled and Flowers within hail, and started on her own way home.
She was anxious to have a talk with her grandfather and ask his advice as to the best way of helping the little boy and his mother, and keeping off the dangers to both which she saw in the future.
It was a lovely day—quite a summer day now—for it was some way on in June, and this year the weather had been remarkably beautiful—never before quite so beautiful since she had come to live in the neighbourhood, thought the young girl to herself, and she sighed a little as she pictured in her own mind what happy days she and her two little pupils might have had in the woods and fields round about Evercombe.
"Poor Ferdy," she thought, "I wonder if he really ever will get well again. That is, in a way, the hardest part of it all—the not knowing. It makes it so difficult to judge how to treat him in so many little ways."
She was not very far from her own home by this time, and looking up along the sunny road, she saw coming towards her a familiar figure.
"I do believe it is Jesse Piggot," she said to herself. "How curious, just when I'd been thinking about him the last day or two!"
Jesse stopped as he came up to her, and it seemed to Miss Lilly that his face grew a little red, though bashfulness was certainly not one of Jesse's weak points.
"Why, Jesse!" she exclaimed, "so you've got back again. How did you get on while you were away?"
Jesse's answer to this question was rather indistinct. He murmured something that sounded like "All right, thank you, miss," but added almost immediately in a brighter tone, "How is Master Ferdy, please?"
"Pretty well," Miss Lilly replied; "that is to say, he doesn't suffer now, and we do all we can to cheer him up."