‘Well, he should have minded; but you’re all against me.’

’You’ll be sorry by-and-by, Alfred; this isn’t like the way you talk sometimes.’

‘Some one else had need to be sorry, not me.’

Perhaps, in the midst of his captious state, Alfred was somewhat pacified by hearing sounds below that made him certain that Harold was not escaping without some strong words from his mother.

They were not properly taken.  Harold was in no mood of repentance, and the consciousness that he had been behaving most unkindly, only made him more rough and self-justifying.

’I can’t help it!  I can’t be a slave to run about everywhere, and remember everything—­pony losing her shoe, and nigh tumbling down with me, and Ross at the post so cross for nothing!’

’You’ll grieve at the way you have used your poor brother one of these days, Harold,’ quietly answered his mother, so low, that Alfred could not hear through the floor.  ‘Now, you’ll please to go to bed.’

‘Ain’t I to have no supper?’ said Harold in a sullen voice, with a great mind to sit down in the chimney-corner in defiance.

’I shall give you something hot when you are in bed.  If I treated you as you deserve, I should send you to Mr. Blunt’s this moment; but I can’t afford to have you ill too, so go to bed this moment.’

His mother could still master him by her steadiness and he went up, muttering that he’d no notion of being treated like a baby, and that he would soon shew her the difference:  he wasn’t going to be made a slave to Alfred, and ’twas all a fuss about that stuff!

He did fancy he said his prayers; but they could not have been real ones, for he was no softer when his mother came to his bedside with a great basin of hot gruel.  He said he hated such nasty sick stuff, and grunted savagely when, with a look that ought to have gone to his heart, she asked if he thought he deserved anything better.

Yet she did not know of the shooting gallery, nor of his false excuses.  If he had not been deceiving her, perhaps he might have been touched.

‘Well, Harold,’ she said at last, after taking the empty basin from him, and picking up his wet clothes and boots to dry them by the fire, ’I hope as you lie there you’ll come to a better mind.  It makes me afraid for you, my boy.  It is not only your brother you are sinning against, but if you are a bad boy, you know Who will be angry with you.  Good-night.’

She lingered, but Harold was still hard, and would neither own himself sorry, nor say good-night.

When she passed his bed at the top of the stairs again, after hanging up the things by the fire, he had his head hidden, and either was, or feigned to be, asleep.

Alfred’s ill-temper was nearly gone, but he still thought himself grievously injured, and was at no pains to keep himself from groaning and moaning all the time he was being put to bed.  In fact, he rather liked to make the most of it, to shew his mother how provoking she was, and to reproach Harold for his neglect.