"And you're quite content to put yourselves into the clutches of that miserable Boney!"
"My dear madam, the First Consul does not wage war on unoffending travellers. Even supposing that hostilities should break out sooner than may reasonably be expected, we have then but to hasten home."
"Boney doesn't care what he does, so long as he can get his own way."
"He will, at least, act in accordance with the laws of civilised nations."
"Not he! Boney makes his own laws to suit himself."
"Well, well, my dear madam, we view these things differently. And since I have fully made up my mind, all this discussion is a waste of good breath. My wife has never been into France, and I desire that she should go. We may not have another opportunity for many years to come."
"Likely enough—while the Corsican lives!" muttered Mrs. Bryce.
The end window opened upon a kind of verandah, and just outside this window, which had been thrown wide open—for it was an unusually hot spring day—a boy lay flat upon the ground, shaping a small wooden boat with his penknife. At the first mention of his name, a fair curly head popped up and popped down again. A recurrence of the word "Roy" brought up the head a second time, and two wide grey eyes stared eagerly over the low sill into the room. He might have been seen easily enough, but that people were too busy to look that way. Then again the head vanished, and its owner lay motionless, apparently listening for two or three minutes, after which he rolled away to a short distance, jumped up, and scampered off to the schoolroom at the back of the house.
It was a good-sized house, with a nice garden, in the then outskirts of London—a much more limited London than the great metropolis of the present day, though even then Englishmen were wont to describe it as "vast." Where Colonel Baron's house stood, with fields and hedges near at hand, miles of streets now extend in all directions. Trafalgar Square and Regent Street were unbuilt; Pimlico and Moorfields alike consisted mainly of bare rough ground; and the City was still a fashionable place of residence. These facts serve to show how small a London existed in those days.
Roy Baron was a handsome well-set-up lad of about twelve, and he had on a blue cloth jacket, with trousers and waistcoat of the same material. Knickerbockers were unknown. Children and bigger boys wore loose trousers, while tights and uncovered stockings were reserved for grown-up gentlemen. In a few weeks Roy would exchange his cloth waistcoat and trousers for linen ditto, either white or striped. Boys' hair was not cropped so closely in the year 1803 as in the Nineties, and a mass of close little curls grew all over Roy's head.