“You save a mile; you drop on the road by Combline’s mill, and then there’s another five-minutes’ cut, and the rest’s road.”

“Then, Crossjay, immediately after breakfast run round behind the pheasantry, and there I’ll find you.  And if any one comes to you before I come, say you are admiring the plumage of the Himalaya—­the beautiful Indian bird; and if we’re found together, we run a race, and of course you can catch me, but you mustn’t until we’re out of sight.  Tell Mr. Vernon at night—­tell Mr. Whitford at night you had the money from me as part of my allowance to you for pocket-money.  I used to like to have pocket-money, Crossjay.  And you may tell him I gave you the holiday, and I may write to him for his excuse, if he is not too harsh to grant it.  He can be very harsh.”

“You look right into his eyes next time, Miss Middleton.  I used to think him awful till he made me look at him.  He says men ought to look straight at one another, just as we do when he gives me my boxing-lesson, and then we won’t have quarrelling half so much.  I can’t recollect everything he says.”

“You are not bound to, Crossjay.”

“No, but you like to hear.”

“Really, dear boy.  I can’t accuse myself of having told you that.”

“No, but, Miss Middleton, you do.  And he’s fond of your singing and playing on the piano, and watches you.”

“We shall be late if we don’t mind,” said Clara, starting to a pace close on a run.

They were in time for a circuit in the park to the wild double cherry-blossom, no longer all white.  Clara gazed up from under it, where she had imagined a fairer visible heavenliness than any other sight of earth had ever given her.  That was when Vernon lay beneath.  But she had certainly looked above, not at him.  The tree seemed sorrowful in its withering flowers of the colour of trodden snow.

Crossjay resumed the conversation.

“He says ladies don’t like him much.”

“Who says that?”

“Mr. Whitford.”

“Were those his words?”

“I forget the words:  but he said they wouldn’t be taught by him, like me, ever since you came; and since you came I’ve liked him ten times more.”

“The more you like him the more I shall like you, Crossjay.”

The boy raised a shout and scampered away to Sir Willoughby, at the appearance of whom Clara felt herself nipped and curling inward.  Crossjay ran up to him with every sign of pleasure.  Yet he had not mentioned him during the walk; and Clara took it for a sign that the boy understood the entire satisfaction Willoughby had in mere shows of affection, and acted up to it.  Hardly blaming Crossjay, she was a critic of the scene, for the reason that youthful creatures who have ceased to love a person, hunger for evidence against him to confirm their hard animus, which will seem to them sometimes, when he is not immediately irritating them, brutish, because they can not analyze it and reduce