‘Good!  Oh, so kind!’

This appeared to convince her.

‘Very generous to you and every one, is he not?’ she said; and from that moment was all questions concerning his kind treatment of the boys, and as to their looking up to him.

I quitted her, taking her message to Heriot:  ’You may tell him—­tell him that I can’t write.’

Heriot frowned on hearing me repeat it.

‘Humph!’ he went, and was bright in a twinkling:  ’that means she’ll come!’ He smacked his hands together, grew black, and asked, ’Did she give that beast Boddy a rose?’

I had to confess she did; and feeling a twinge of my treason to her, felt hers to Heriot.

‘Humph!’ he went; ‘she shall suffer for that.’

All this was like music going on until the curtain should lift and reveal my father to me.

There was soon a secret to be read in Heriot’s face for one who loved it as I did.  Julia’s betrayed nothing.  I was not taken into their confidence, and luckily not; otherwise I fear I should have served them ill, I was so poor a dissembler and was so hotly plied with interrogations by the suspicious usher.  I felt sure that Heriot and Julia met.  His eyes were on her all through prayer-time, and hers wandered over the boys’ heads till they rested on him, when they gave a short flutter and dropped, like a bird shot dead.  The boys must have had some knowledge that love was busy in their midst, for they spoke of Heriot and Julia as a jolly couple, and of Boddy as one meaning to play the part of old Nick the first opportunity.  She was kinder to them than ever.  It was not a new thing that she should send in cakes of her own making, but it was extraordinary that we should get these thoughtful presents as often as once a fortnight, and it became usual to hear a boy exclaim, either among a knot of fellows or to himself, ’By jingo, she is a pretty girl!’ on her passing out of the room, and sometimes entirely of his own idea.  I am persuaded that if she had consented to marry Boddy, the boys would have been seriously disposed to conspire to jump up in the church and forbid the banns.  We should have preferred to hand her to the junior usher, Catman, of whom the rumour ran in the school that he once drank a bottle of wine and was sick after it, and he was therefore a weak creature to our minds; the truth of the rumour being confirmed by his pale complexion.  That we would have handed our blooming princess to him was full proof of our abhorrence of Boddy.  I might have thought with the other boys that she was growing prettier, only I never could imagine her so delicious as when she smiled at my father.

The consequence of the enlistment of the whole school in Heriot’s interests was that at cricket-matches, picnics on the hills, and boating on the canal, Mr. Boddy was begirt with spies, and little Temple reported to Heriot a conversation that he, lying hidden in tall grass, had heard between Boddy and Julia.  Boddy asked her to take private lessons in French from him.  Heriot listened to the monstrous tale as he was on the point of entering Julia’s boat, where Boddy sat beside her, and Heriot rowed stroke-oar.  He dipped his blade, and said, loud enough to be heard by me in Catman’s boat,