“Oh!  Look!”

Her hand was pulling at his arm.  There in the field over the hedge a buzzard hawk was dropping like a stone.

“Oh, Mark!  Oh!  Oh!  It’s got it!”

She was covering her face with both her hands, and the hawk, with a young rabbit in its claws, was sailing up again.  It looked so beautiful that he did not somehow feel sorry for the rabbit; but he wanted to stroke and comfort her, and said: 

“It’s all right, Sylvia; it really is.  The rabbit’s dead already, you know.  And it’s quite natural.”

She took her hands away from a face that looked just as if she were going to cry.

“Poor little rabbit!  It was such a little one!”

XII

On the afternoon of the day following he sat in the smoking-room with a prayer book in his hand, and a frown on his forehead, reading the Marriage Service.  The book had been effectively designed for not spoiling the figure when carried in a pocket.  But this did not matter, for even if he could have read the words, he would not have known what they meant, seeing that he was thinking how he could make a certain petition to a certain person sitting just behind at a large bureau with a sliding top, examining artificial flies.

He fixed at last upon this form: 

“Gordy!” (Why Gordy no one quite knew now—­whether because his name was George, or by way of corruption from Guardian.) “When Cis is gone it’ll be rather awful, won’t it?”

“Not a bit.”

Mr. Heatherley was a man of perhaps sixty-four, if indeed guardians have ages, and like a doctor rather than a squire; his face square and puffy, his eyes always half-closed, and his curly mouth using bluntly a voice of that refined coarseness peculiar to people of old family.

“But it will, you know!”

“Well, supposin’ it is?”

“I only wondered if you’d mind asking Mr. and Mrs. Stormer to come here for a little—­they were awfully kind to me out there.”

“Strange man and woman!  My dear fellow!”

“Mr. Stormer likes fishing.”

“Does he?  And what does she like?”

Very grateful that his back was turned, the boy said: 

“I don’t know—­anything—­she’s awfully nice.”

“Ah!  Pretty?”

He answered faintly: 

“I don’t know what you call pretty, Gordy.”

He felt, rather than saw, his guardian scrutinizing him with those half-closed eyes under their gouty lids.

“All right; do as you like.  Have ’em here and have done with it, by all means.”

Did his heart jump?  Not quite; but it felt warm and happy, and he said: