“I heard him whistling, Daddy, and I let him in,” spoke up Jane. Mr. Lambert merely said,
“Ah! Well, don’t let it happen again my boy. It made me very uneasy.”
No further reference was made to the matter.
“There was no harm in it,” thought Paul. “They have the impression that Jeff is a black sheep, and it would be a silly thing to go out of my way to tell ’em that I saw him again. Uncle would have a fit, and it’s such a little thing to deliberately get up a row about.”
And so being satisfied that his mild escapade would have no uncomfortable results he thought no more about it.
[CHAPTER XIII—DISASTER]
Poor Janey was feeling very blue indeed. During the last week it seemed to her that Paul had somehow grown so different—rather inclined to be cross and uncommunicative, and even to avoid her company. That very afternoon he had told her please not to bother him while he was painting, or he never would get his picture done, and twice when she had offered to take a walk with him, he had refused her company with no very gracious excuse.
Thus ignored and rebuffed, she had sadly devoted herself to deeds of charity, and on that sultry afternoon sat with Carl reading aloud to him from a fat dull book about the ancient Britons. They were sitting in the little garden, where the shadow of the house offered some protection from the sun; Carl reposing like a Sultan in his easy chair, gazing up at the motionless weathervane on the gable of the attic, and occasionally begging Jane “not to mumble her words.” The attic was on the third floor just above Granny’s room, in a part of the house that formed an ell, bounding the garden on the south side with its ivy-covered wall.
“I say, Jane, do you suppose that Paul is smoking?” said Carl suddenly, interrupting the monotonous flow of Jane’s reading.
“What?”