“‘Please, ma’am,’ I stammered, ‘there’s money in my room, but I was given it by a——’
“‘Don’t incriminate yourself,’ said she, coldly and precisely; ‘there are no witnesses present. Silence.’
“The cook and policeman came up the garden; I can hear their footsteps on the gravel now, and the ticking of Miss Pringle’s neat-faced clock. It was half-past four by that clock, I remember—my tea-time, and the time when I usually fed Mag. The thought rushed into my head, if I am taken up what will Mag do? How am I to tell Nelly?
“They knocked at the door, which Miss Pringle unlocked. The policeman put the money he had found on the desk in front of her, and put his hand on my shoulder. The cook sobbed, the clock ticked; no one said anything; Miss Pringle looked away from me, and I really think she was sorry.
“At last she looked up and opened her tight lips, but what she was going to say I never knew, for at that moment I made a bolt through the window, upsetting the neat geraniums in their pots, and tumbling headlong into the flower-bed which I had tidied in the morning, I scudded down the garden into the yard, over the gate into the paddock, through the hedge, and away at full speed in the direction of Nelly’s cottage.
“I can recollect all quite clearly now, up to the moment when I saw the policeman running after me and gaining ground while I struggled through a hedge. Then I got wild and heated, I suppose, and I remember nothing more distinctly. But Nelly says that I came rushing into their garden, shouting to her, ‘Look after Mag,’ for the police were after me for stealing. She thought at first I was at one of my games, and told me to run off and climb up a tree, and she would bring me food; and I was just going off towards the three elms when the policeman ran in and collared me, and then she fought him and called him names till her mother came out and dragged her away. This is what she told me months afterwards.
“That was the last I saw of Nelly for a long, long time. I was locked up, and the magistrates made short work of me. Of course they laughed at my story of the sovereign and the gentleman, for I neither knew his name nor where he lived. All went against me; the shopkeeper proved that I had changed a sovereign, Miss Pringle proved she had left one on her desk, the housemaid proved that I had been gardening at the window, the cook that the money was found in my drawer, and the policeman that I had run away; and that groom never came for the change. The parson gave me a good character, and Miss Pringle asked them to be merciful. How could she help it, poor soul? She really had begun to like me, I believe, but I spoilt it all by telling her that I wanted no mercy from her, as she believed I was a liar. So they sentenced me to be imprisoned for a fortnight, and then to be sent for three years to the Reformatory School which had lately been opened in the county.
“The gaol I didn’t mind so much, though it was bad enough, but that school took all the spirit out of me. There’s no need for me to tell you what I went through there, the washings and scrubbings, the school dress—a badge of disgrace; the having to obey orders sharp, or get sharp punishment; the feeling that all the boys thought me a thief like themselves, and up to all their low ways and talk; and then the bad things I heard, the sense of injustice rankling in my heart, and making me hate every one. I think I should have soon become as bad as any young thief in the place, but for the thought of Nelly and Mag, and even they were beginning to be less in my thoughts, and I was beginning to get hammered down by hard work and punishment into an ordinary dogged young sinner, when something happened which brought the old life into me again, like a shower of rain on a crop in August.
“One day, when I was working at the bottom of the big school field, with a squad of young criminals, under the eye of a task-master, I heard from the other side of the thick hedge the note of a yellow-hammer. Yes, it was the yellow-hammer’s song, ‘a little bit of bread and no che-e-se;’ but I knew in an instant that it was not the voice of a bird, and I knew of only one human creature who could whistle the song so exactly. It was the signal by which Nelly used to make me aware of her arrival, when she came over the fields to see me and Mag at Miss Pringle’s.
“My heart, as they say, nearly jumped into my mouth. I can’t describe to you how it was; I only know that I went on digging with my eyes full of tears—for of course the first fancy that Nelly was really there, fled away almost at once, and left me feeling as if I had had a dream. But then it came again, twice over, and louder, not twenty yards away from me.