Perhaps Mr. Carleton felt it so, for, after his first expression of pleasure, he stood silently and gravely looking for a long time. Little Fleda's eye loved it too, but she looked her fill, and then sat down on a stone to await her companion's pleasure, glancing now and then up at his face, which gave her no encouragement to interrupt him. It was gravely, and even gloomily thoughtful. He stood so long without stirring, that poor Fleda began to have sad thoughts of the possibility of gathering all the nuts from the hickory- trees, and she heaved a very gentle sigh once or twice; but the dark blue eye which she with reason admired, remained fixed on the broad scene below, as if it were reading, or trying to read there a difficult lesson. And when at last he turned and began to go up the path again, he kept the same face, and went moodily swinging his arm up and down, as if in disturbed thought. Fleda was too happy to be moving to care for her companion's silence; she would have compounded for no more conversation, so they might but reach the nut-trees. But before they had got quite so far, Mr. Carleton broke the silence, speaking in precisely the same tone and manner he had used the last time.
"Look here, Fairy," said he, pointing to a small heap of chestnut burs piled at the foot of a tree "here's a little fortune for you already."
"That's a squirrel!" said Fleda, looking at the place very attentively. "There has been nobody else here. He has put them together, ready to be carried off to his nest."
"We'll save him that trouble," said Mr. Carleton. "Little rascal! he's a Didenhover in miniature."
"Oh, no!" said Fleda; "he had as good a right to the nuts, I am sure, as we have, poor fellow. Mr. Carleton "
Mr. Carleton was throwing the nuts into the basket. At the anxious and undecided tone in which his name was pronounced, he stopped, and looked up at a very wistful face.
"Mightn't we leave these nuts till we come back? If we find the trees over here full, we shan't want them; and if we don't, these would be only a handful "
"And the squirrel would be disappointed?" said Mr. Carleton, smiling. "You would rather we should leave them to him!"
Fleda said yes, with a relieved face, and Mr. Carleton, still smiling, emptied his basket of the few nuts he had put in, and they walked on.
In a hollow, rather a deep hollow, behind the crest of the hill, as Fleda had said, they came at last to a noble group of large hickory-trees, with one or two chestnuts standing in attendance on the outskirts. And, also, as Fleda had said, or hoped, the place was so far from convenient access, that nobody had visited them; they were thick hung with fruit. If the spirit of the game had been wanting or failing in Mr. Carleton, it must have roused again into full life at the joyous heartiness of Fleda's exclamations. At any rate, no boy could have taken to the business better. He cut, with her permission, a stout long pole in the woods; and swinging himself lightly into one of the trees, showed that he was a master in the art of whipping them. Fleda was delighted, but not surprised; for, from the first moment of Mr. Carleton's proposing to go with her, she had been privately sure that he would not prove an inactive or inefficient ally. By whatever slight tokens she might read this, in whatsoever fine characters of the eye, or speech, or manner, she knew it; and knew it just as well before they reached the hickory-trees as she did afterwards.