Then he turned.  He had been startled, it is true, and grieved to see the pain her chance words had caused her.  But now a great glow of delight rose up within him, and he could have called aloud to the blue skies and the silent woods because of the joy that filled his heart.  They were but chance words, of course.  They were uttered with no deliberate intention:  on the contrary, her quick look of pain showed how bitterly she regretted the blunder.  Moreover, he congratulated himself on his rapid piece of acting, and assured himself that she would believe that he had not noticed that admission of hers.  They were idle words:  she would forget them.  The incident, so far as she was concerned, was gone.

But not so far as he was concerned.  For now he knew that the person whom, above all other persons in the world, he was most desirous to please, whose respect and esteem he was most anxious to obtain, had not only condoned much of his idleness out of the abundant charity of her heart, but had further, and by chance, revealed to him that she gave him some little share of that affection which she seemed to shed generously and indiscriminately on so many folks and things around her.  He, too, was now in the charmed circle.  He walked with a new pride through the warm, green meadows, his rod over his shoulder:  he whistled as he went, or he sang snatches of “The Rose of Allandale.”  He met two small boys out bird’s-nesting:  he gave them a shilling apiece, and then inconsistently informed them that if he caught them then or at any other time with a bird’s nest in their hands he would cuff their ears.  Then he walked hastily home, put by his fishing-rod, and shut himself up in his study with half a dozen of those learned volumes which he had brought back unsoiled from school.

CHAPTER XXII.

ON WINGS OF HOPE.

When Trelyon arrived late one evening at Penzance he was surprised to find his uncle’s coachman awaiting him at the station:  “What’s the matter, Tobias?  Is the old gentleman going to die?  You don’t mean to say you are here for me?”

“Yaaes, zor, I be,” said the little old man with no great courtesy.

“Then he is going to die if he sends out his horse at this time o’ night.  Look here, Tobias:  I’ll put my portmanteau inside and come on the box to have a talk with you—­you’re such a jolly old card, you know—­and you’ll tell me all that’s happened since I last enjoyed my uncle’s bountiful hospitality.”

This the young man did:  and then the brown-faced, wiry and surly little person, having started his horse, proceeded to tell his story in a series of grumbling and disconnected sentences.  He was not nearly so taciturn as he looked:  “The maaester he went suen to bed to-night:  ‘twere Miss Juliott sent me to the station, without tellin’ en.  He’s gettin’ worse and worse, that’s sure:  if yue be for giving me half a crown, like, or any one that comes to the house, he finds it out and stops it out o’ my wages:  yes, he does, zor, the old fule!”