“Thank Heaven he is not killed!” exclaims Aunt Caroline, fervently.

“Thank God, indeed!” echoes my uncle, and gives me a look as much as to say that I am not to be thanked for it.  “I have often warned you, sir,” he says to Mr. Carvel, “that we do not inherit from stocks and stones.  And so much has come of our charity.”

I knew, lad that I was; that he spoke of my mother; and my blood boiled within me.

“Have a care, sir, with your veiled insults,” I cried, “or I will serve you as I have served your son.”

Grafton threw up his hands.

“What have we harboured, father?” says he.  But Mr. Carvel seized him by the shoulder.  “Peace, Grafton, before the servants,” he said, “and cease thy crying, Caroline.  The lad is not hurt.”  And being a tall man, six feet in his stockings, and strong despite his age, he raised Philip from the grass, and sternly bade him walk to the house, which he did, leaning on his mother’s arm.  “As for you, Richard,” my grandfather went on, “you will go into my study.”

Into his study I went, where presently he came also, and I told him the affair in as few words as I might.  And he, knowing my hatred of falsehood, questioned me not at all, but paced to and fro, I following him with my eyes, and truly sorry that I had given him pain.  And finally he dismissed me, bidding me make it up with my cousin, which I was nothing loth to do.  What he said to Philip and his father I know not.  That evening we shook hands, though Philip’s face was much swollen, and my uncle smiled, and was even pleasanter than before, saying that boys would be boys.  But I think my Aunt Caroline could never wholly hide the malice she bore me for what I had done that day.

When at last the visitors were gone, every face on the plantation wore a brighter look.  Harvey said:  “God bless their backs, which is the only part I ever care to see of their honours.”  And Willis gave us a supper fit for a king.  Mr. Lloyd and his lady were with us, and Mr. Carvel told his old stories of the time of the First George, many of which I can even now repeat:  how he and two other collegians fought half a dozen Mohocks in Norfolk Street, and fairly beat them; and how he discovered by chance a Jacobite refugee in Greenwich, and what came of it; nor did he forget that oft-told episode with Dean Swift.  And these he rehearsed in such merry spirit and new guise that we scarce recognized them, and Colonel Lloyd so choked with laughter that more than once he had to be hit between the shoulders.

CHAPTER V

“If ladies be but young and fair”