“Then why go away?  Why, why?”

“Because a man leaves father and mother and every thing for the woman he loves.  Charley, help me.”

She shook her head sadly.

“Help me to break the trouble to father.”

“There is no ‘breaking’ it.  It will break him.  It will kill him.  Alas, it is the ungrateful child that has the power to inflict a slow and torturing death!  Poor father!  Poor mother!  And it is I that must witness it.  I, that would die to save them from such undeserved sorrow.”

Then Harry rose up angrily, pushed his chair impatiently away, and without a word went to his own room.

In the morning the squire came down to breakfast in exceedingly high spirits.  A Scotchman would have called him “fey,” and been certain that misfortune was at his heels.  And Charlotte looked at him in wondering pity, for Harry’s face was the face of a man determined to carry out his own will regardless of consequences.

“Come, come, Harry,” said the squire in a loud, cheerful voice, “you are moping, and eating no breakfast.  Charlotte will have to fill three times before it is ‘cup down’ with me.  I think we will take Dobbin, and go over to Windermere in the tax-cart.  The roads will be a bit sloppery, but Dobbin isn’t too old to splash through them at a rattling pace.  He is a famous good old-has-been is Dobbin.  Give me a Suffolk Punch for a roadster.  I set much by them.  Eh?  What?”

“I must leave Sandal this morning, sir.”

“Sir me no sir, Harry.  ‘Father’ will stand between you and me, I think.  You must make a put-off for one day.  I was at Bowness last week, and they say such a winter for char-fishing was never seen.  While I was on the lakeside, Kit Noble’s boat came in.  He had all of twenty dozen in the bottom of it.  Mr. Wordsworth was there too, and he made a piece of poetry about ‘The silvery lights playing over them;’ and he took me to see a picture that a London gentleman painted of Kit and his boat.  You never saw fish out of the water look so fresh; their olive-green backs and vermillion bellies and dark-red fins were as natural as life.  Come Harry, we will go and fetch over a few dozen.  If you carry your colonel some, he will take the gift as an excuse for the day.  Eh?  What?”

“I think Harry had better not go with you, father.”

“Eh?  What is the matter with you, Charlotte?  You are as nattert and cross as never was.  Where is your mother?  I like my morning cup filled with a smile.  It helps the day through.”

“Mother isn’t feeling well.  She had a bad dream about Harry and you, and she is making herself sick over it.  She is all in a tremble.  I didn’t think mother was so foolish.”

“Dreams are from somewhere beyond us, Charlotte.  There’s them that visit us a-dreaming.  I am not so wise as to be foolish.  I believe in some things that are outside of my short wits.  Maybe we had better not go to Windermere.  We might be tempted into a boat, and dry land is a middling bit safer.  Eh?  What?”