“What are you going to do, Rob?” asked Roy, eagerly, after their first greetings had been exchanged; “you aren’t going home again?”

“I’d sooner be shot,” was the short reply.

“I’ve been talking to Aunt Judy about you again this morning, and she says if you would like to help our old gardener in the garden and could get a character from some one, she’d try you.  I don’t quite know what she means about the character.  I thought that belonged to you and not to any one else.  She says she doesn’t know what you’re like, but I told her I’d find out.  I say, take a chair, won’t you.  Now then, you don’t mind my asking you a few questions, do you?  Are you a thief?”

Rob took the chair that was offered him, squared his shoulders, and looked up with a pleasant smile at this blunt question.

“No, I ain’t that.”

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

“No.”

“Are you a drunkard?”

“I hate the stuff!”

“Are you a fighter?”

“Well, no, not a reg’lar one.  I can’t say I’ve never knocked a feller down, or squared up with him a bit, but I don’t fight till I’m driven to it.”

“Are you a liar?”

“No.”

Roy drew a sigh of relief, then continued:  “Well, if you aren’t any of those, I’m sure Aunt Judy will have you, I told her I knew you weren’t wicked.”

“But I ain’t no scholar,” said Rob, doubtfully; “I can’t write nor read, and that’s against a feller!”

“Oh, well, you won’t have to read and write much in the garden.  Old Hal can’t read either, and he makes a cross for his name when he has to write it.  But I suppose you can learn, can’t you?”

Rob nodded.

“You see I played truant mostly when I was sent to school, and then I began to mind the cattle soon after I were eight year old, but if any body would start me, I believe I could pick it up.”

“I’ll teach you myself when I’ve nothing else to do,” said Roy, grandly; “for I want you to be clever.  I want you to come with me, when I’m grown up, to my big house.  You shall be my head servant, and live with me always.  Would you like that?”

Rob grinned, and seemed to think it a great joke.

Roy continued:  “Of course I shall want you more when Dudley goes away.  He has got a stepfather, so when he grows up he will go out to India, I expect, to live with him, but we don’t talk of it, and we pretend we’re never going to leave each other.  Did you find Dudley very much heavier to carry than me?”

“Well, yes, he were a bit heavier.”

“I’m afraid I shall never catch him up, he is nearly a head taller, and he seems to grow quicker every month.  I grow so slowly.  I think it is because I lie in bed so much more than he does, I’m always having to go to bed in the daytime when I’m ill, and that must keep you from growing, don’t you think so?”

The conversation was here interrupted by Miss Bertram’s entrance.  She had a long talk with Rob, and in the end took him for a month on trial, as she had known his father.