“Why,” said I, “that’s just exactly what Tempest said to me.”
“There you are again,” broke in Dicky, cutting himself a hunch of cake.
Presently Redwood began to “draw” me on the subject of Tempest, and looked rather blank when I told him of the dismal circumstances in which the term had closed at Sharpe’s. However, he did not favour Dicky and me with much comment on the matter, and finally got us to help him sharpen his skates and talk about other things.
I went to bed that night at Dicky’s more easy and hopeful than I had been for weeks, and felt half-impatient for term to begin again, so that I might put into practice the new and trebly-patent specific of lying low.
Chapter Twenty Two.
Putting on the Brake.
The holidays went by rapidly enough. I tore myself away from Dicky’s consoling companionship three days from the end, and rushed home to see my mother. I wonder what she thought of the difference a couple of weeks had made in me? When I started to Dicky’s I had been limp, dejected, and down on my luck. Now she found me chirpy, and with a stiff upper lip. She did not make remarks, but I could see how relieved she was.
My mother was not the person to take a mean advantage of me, or get me into a corner to lecture me. Rather not! She took me for what I was, and let me see how she loved me. That was the proper sort of help for me. In some ways she made less of me than usual, but I could see why she did that; she saw I wanted letting alone, and she did it, bless her! Only on the last evening, a Sunday, as we walked back from church, she said—