"No, of course not," said Ferdy, before his governess had time to answer. "My thinked window isn't built, it's cut out; it's all beautiful flowers and leaves, like the real window in summer, only far, far prettier. And there are birds' nests, with them almost flying, they are so light and feathery looking, and—" he stopped, and lay back with his eyes closed and a dreamy smile on his face.
"When you are older," said Miss Lilly, "I hope you will travel a good deal and go to see some of the wonderful carvings there are in Italy and Germany, and indeed in England too. Not only wood-carving, but sculpture. Fancy, stone worked so as to look as if a breath of air would make it quiver!"
She spoke perhaps a little thoughtlessly, and in an instant she felt that she had done so, for Ferdy opened his big blue eyes and gazed up at her with a strange wistful expression.
"Miss Lilly dear," he said, "you mustn't count on my doing anything like that—travelling, I mean, or things well people can do. P'r'aps, you know, I'll be all my life like this."
Eva turned her head aside. She did not want either Ferdy or his sister to see that his quaint words made her feel very sad—that, indeed, they brought the tears very near her eyes.
And in a minute or two Ferdy seemed to have forgotten his own sad warning. He was laughing with Christine at the comical expression of a pigling which he had mounted on the back of a rather eccentric-looking donkey—it was his first donkey, and he had found it more difficult than old Jerrys.
That evening a pleasant and very unexpected thing happened.
It was a lesson evening, but a few minutes before the time a message was brought to the oriel room by good-natured Thomas. It was from Jesse to ask if he might come up, though he knew it was too early, as he wanted "pertickler" to see Master Ferdy before "the gentleman came."
"He may, mayn't he, Miss Lilly?" asked the little invalid.
"Oh yes," Eva replied. She was careful to please Mrs. Ross by not letting Jesse ever forget to be quite polite and respectful, and never, as he would have called it himself, "to take freedoms," and there was a sort of natural quickness about the boy which made it easy to do this.