By this time the contents of the yellow bowl were not only in the oven, but sending out of it the most savory of odors; and a few moments later the little household sat down to such a delicious breakfast as the doctor and Harry repeatedly declared they never before had eaten; so that Mrs. Hartley sat proud and radiant behind the plated coffee-urn, and Martha passed the Sally Lunn with indescribable complacency. Indeed, there was reaction on every side from the night of anxiety and foreboding. Even Mr. Hartley could not hold out against the general atmosphere of good cheer, and falling into a friendly discussion with the doctor, forgot to wear for a while a certain uncompromising look, intended to impress Mr. Allyn with the simple enormity of his transgression. But happily Harry Allyn needed no such impressing. It was impossible for any one to regard this adventure in any graver light than he, and yet, strange to say, he was happier than he had been for many a day. It had taken a pretty terrible experience to bring him to his senses; perhaps nothing less terrible would have answered; but he saw plainly enough now what a down-hill road he and Ted had been travelling, and with the realization came the decision to “right about face,” and with the decision an old-time sensation began to assert itself, and there lay the secret of the happiness. It is an intangible, uplifting something, that sensation that men call self-respect, and when they lose it they seem to lose the capacity for any happiness worth the name, and when they cannot be persuaded to make an effort to get it back again, there seems to be little enough that they're good for. Harry, however, with grateful heart found himself ready for the effort, and, fully aware at last of how much he had been risking, was resolved that regain his self-respect he would, let it cost what it might. He only hoped, from the bottom of his heart, that Ted would come to see matters in the same honest light, and be ready to make the same effort.
Soon after breakfast the doctor took his departure, and then Harry had a quiet little talk with Ted.
“You're not to speak a word, old man,” he said, as he stood beside the bed; “the doctor says so; but there are one or two things he is willing I should say to you. In the first place, Ted, we've had a very narrow escape, and we've no one to blame but ourselves. And the truth is, Ted, we've been a pair of incomparable fools, you and I, and if we don't take this lesson to heart, there's no hope for either of us. In the second place, we can't be too thankful we've fallen into the hands of these good people here. You couldn't be better cared for anywhere, and the best of it is, no one need know where you are, and they need never hear of this disgraceful adventure up at Windsor. Indeed, for the sake of shielding you, I have told the Hartleys that your name is Morris, and it rests with you to tell them your right name some day if you choose; hut the doctor knows the truth about things—he had to know.” A look of inexpressible relief had been stealing over Ted's face, and he started to make some reply, but Harry shook his head in most determined fashion, and was off before the words could get themselves into line. Ted found, too, that his brain responded very slowly to any sort of demand upon it, and was willing enough to be spared the exertion.
A little later Harry set off for Oxford, to bring certain necessities for Ted and himself down to Nuneham, for he meant to take up his abode at the inn, so that he would be near the Hartleys, and be able to render every possible service to them and to Ted. Before he started, however, he underwent quite an ordeal. Feeling he had no right to assume that Ted would stay until he had that permission from Mr. Hartley personally, he sought him out, where he was at work in a corner of the meadow, and the result, as he had anticipated, was a very plain talk—so unsparingly and pointedly plain that Harry winced a good deal in the process, and once or twice came near resenting a mode of procedure that seemed very much akin to knocking a fellow when he's down. But, after all, what did he not deserve, and as Mr. Hartley said, among other things, that he was not the man to turn a body out of his house, and that Mr. Morris was welcome to stay, he felt he ought to be able to bear with the rest, no matter how humiliating and, in a measure, unmerited. Mrs. Hartley, standing in the kitchen door, imagined from Harry's flushed face, as well as from life-long acquaintance with Mr. Hartley's temperament, that he had been pretty severely dealt with, and so said as he passed, “My gude man's a gude man, though,” Mr. Allyn and Harry, amused at the loyalty to her husband and kindliness to him combined in the speech, had the grace to answer, “Indeed I believe you, Mrs. Hartley.”