"No, Roy, you couldn't," the Colonel answered with gravity, while delighted at the boy's openness.
"I didn't mean any harm; but I suppose I oughtn't to have listened. I won't ever again, sir."
"Well, yes; of course that was wrong," the Colonel said, with a careful choice of words. "You should have told us that you were there. And you must not look upon the plan as—ahem—as quite settled. We are merely discussing it; and we might change our intentions——"
"I am sure, my dear sir, I heartily wish you would," chimed in Mrs. Bryce.
The Colonel made her a stately bow.
"And if I had found you out, Roy, overhearing us, I should certainly have blamed you. But as you have voluntarily confessed it, I"—the Colonel hesitated, conscious of his wife's pleading gaze—"well, we need say no more about the matter. You have acted rightly in coming at once to me; and I am convinced that you will not do such a thing again. Now you may run away."
Roy bounded off in the best of spirits, and Mrs. Bryce remarked, "There is an opportunity to give up your scheme. Best possible punishment for the boy. Were he my boy he should suffer for his behaviour."
"But Roy is my son," the Colonel said, and there was an accent of pride in his voice.
The pretty girl, with tall feathers in her bonnet, glided softly out of the room after Roy. She did not follow him far. She saw him vanish in the direction of the garden, flourishing his heels like a young colt, and she went the other way, towards the school-room. For Roy had told Molly about the Paris plan, and Polly guessed what that would mean to Molly.
Mary Keene and her brother John, commonly known as "Polly" and "Jack," were not really cousins to Roy and Molly, though treated as such by the family. Their widowed grandmother, Mrs. Keene, had, some fourteen years earlier, married a second time—rather late in life—and her new husband, Mr. Fairbank, had one daughter, Harriette, then just married to Captain Baron. Two or three years later her own grandchildren, Jack and Polly, were left orphans, and were taken in permanently by Mr. and Mrs. Fairbank. When Mr. Fairbank died, some four or five years before this date, his twice-widowed wife took up her abode, with her grandchildren, in Bath, then a fashionable place of residence for "the quality." Jack, who was a year and more older than Polly had, at the beginning of this story, just been gazetted to a regiment of the line, which was quartered in Bath.