"My father knows the man—he owes my father some money, I think. I'll see if I can do anything."
They ran down the lane together, and doing so encountered Tommy, flushed and ruffled.
"O, Tommy"—Madge began, but stopped suddenly, at the look on Tommy's face.
For to Tommy this seemed the lowest depth of his degradation, that the pale boy should be a witness of his discomfiture.
He looked at them angrily, and then, turning on his heel, struck out across the fields, the iron entering deeply into his soul.
Youth is imitative, and Tommy had often heard the phrase.
"I—I don't care a damn," he said.
For a moment he felt half-frightened, but the birds were still singing in the hedge, and, in the next field, the reapers still chattered gaily at their work.
Moreover, the phrase seemed both consolatory and emphatic.
"I don't care a damn," he repeated, slowly, climbing the stile, into the next field.