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”

No boyhood could have been happier than mine, and throughout it, ever present with me, were a shadow and a light.  The shadow was my Uncle Grafton.  I know not what strange intuition of the child made me think of him so constantly after that visit he paid us, but often I would wake from my sleep with his name upon my lips, and a dread at my heart.  The light—­need I say?—­was Miss Dorothy Manners.  Little Miss Dolly was often at the Hall after that happy week we spent together; and her home, Wilmot House, was scarce three miles across wood and field by our plantation roads.  I was a stout little fellow enough, and before I was twelve I had learned to follow to hounds my grandfather’s guests on my pony; and Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Carvel when they shot on the duck points.  Ay, and what may surprise you, my dears, I was given a weak little toddy off the noggin at night, while the gentlemen stretched their limbs before the fire, or played at whist or loo Mr. Carvel would have no milksop, so he said.  But he early impressed upon me that moderation was the mark of a true man, even as excess was that of a weak one.