“No—Mus’ Lamb wouldn’t have it. Besides, there wurn’t no reason as he should stay. We’ve done wudout him here since he went to the Manor, and Mus’ Lamb ull kip his plaace fur him till he comes back.”
Tom envied Bill his free heart.
“I’ll give him a call,” continued Bill’s mother. “He aun’t due up at the Manor fur an hour yit, and he wur saying only last night as he never sees you now.”
A few minutes later Bill answered his mother’s call, and sauntered round the corner of the house, his hands in his pockets, his chauffeur’s cap a little on one side. He had a handsome, fresh-coloured face, strangely cheeky for a country boy’s, and Tom always felt rather ill at ease in his presence, a little awed by the fact that though his hands might sometimes be brown and greasy with motor-oil, his body was of a well-washed whiteness unknown at Worge.
“Hullo, Bill.”
“Hullo, Tom.”
There had never been a very deep friendship between them; Bill was inclined to be patronising, and Tom both to resent it and to envy him. But to-day a new, mysterious bond was linking them. In the pocket of Bill’s neat livery there was a paper exactly like that in Tom’s manure-slopped corduroys.
“I hear you’ve bin called up, Bill.”
“Yes—in a fortnight, they say.”
“I’m going too—in a fortnight.”