“Nurse always makes such a molly-coddle of me, and so does granny; but I’ll try as hard as I can to be better.”

“And now just look at these!  Old Principle says these show that the sea must have washed up amongst the hills and into his cave hundreds of years ago, for these belong to salt water fish not river ones.  Look at them!  ‘Fossils’ he calls them, they’re shells made out of stone.  He told me I might give you these from him.  I thought he would never go back to his cave again after last December, but he says he feels so much stronger now; and he is very careful how he digs; he won’t let me come near him while he does it.  And he told me he has been busy writing a paper which he is going to send to some society in London—­I forget its name.  He is what you call a discoverer, isn’t he?”

Roy nodded, then asked anxiously: 

“Dudley, were you rude to granny before you went out?  Aunt Judy came to look for you here, and she said she hoped you were going to beg granny’s pardon for something.”

“I’ll go now, I had almost forgotten.”

And Dudley trotted off to his grandmother’s room.  She received him sternly, but he was so abjectly penitent that she soon forgave him, and he returned to Roy with a relieved mind.

“It’s a dreadful thing to have a temper,” he remarked, as he sat upon the nursery table swinging his legs to and fro; “I’ve given granny an awful headache by the way I banged her door.”

“What was it about?” asked Roy, with interest.

“About school,” was the answer; “I told her I wasn’t going away from you.”

“I’ve been thinking of it a lot,” said Roy, with a sigh; “but you’ll have to go, and I shall get on pretty well without you.  You see a boy with one leg wouldn’t be much good amongst a lot of other boys.  They would only call him a cripple and push him aside.  I shouldn’t like them to laugh at me.  The only thing for me is a cripple school.  Nurse has a little grandson at one.  I don’t much care for cripples, those I’ve seen seem very poor creatures with no fun in them, but of course I’m one myself now; only I don’t feel like it.”

“You’re no more a cripple than I am,” was Dudley’s indignant rejoinder, “why no one would tell anything was the matter with you to look at you.”

“We won’t talk any more about it,” said Roy, “I’m hungry and I hear tea coming.”

But both the little hearts were very full of a possible separation, and for some days after it lay like a heavy nightmare on them.  Then a letter arrived from Rob which turned the current of their thoughts.  It was his first letter from India, and the boys looked at the foreign stamps and paper, as if it were the greatest rarity on earth.

   “My dear master Roy: