As young Morris rode up he looked at me a little insolently—maybe it was only my fancy, for prejudice is a poor interpreter of expression—and nodded good day.
I saw that Tommy looked a little uncomfortable and his flow of chatter ceased suddenly.
Morris bent from the saddle and called him, and as I turned to the shop window I could hear them greeting one another.
I did not hear their further conversation, and it was only brief, but the Tommy who walked home with me thenceforward was not the same who had met me so buoyantly at the station.
Ah, these clouds, that are no greater than a man's hand and by reason of their very slenderness are so difficult to dispel!
The early days of August sped away happily enough, and their adventures were merely those of field, and stream, and valley, engrossing enough of the time and fraught no doubt with lessons of experience, but too trivial, I suppose, for record.
And yet I would rather write of them than of the day—the 8th of August—when the Borcombe eleven beat Camslove by many runs.
And yet again, I am not sure, for a peril realised early, even through a fall, may be the presage of ultimate victory.
I had been in town all day myself, and therefore had not been amongst the enthusiastic little crowd gathered in the field behind the church to watch this annual encounter, and a typical English country crowd it was, brimful of sport—see the eager movements of those gnarled hands and the light in the clear open-air eyes and wrinkled faces.
Camslove, too, had more than justified the prediction of their adherents and had made a hundred and fifty runs, a very creditable score.