“Come in, Rodney, and shut the door.”

After that, of course, we cannot listen.

They two sat together for almost two hours.  In that time, Mr. Sherrett was first discomposed; then set right upon one or two little points that had puzzled and disappointed him, and to which his son could furnish the key; then thoroughly roused and anxious at this first dealing with his boy as a man, with all a man’s hopes and wishes quickening him to a serious purpose; at last, touched sympathetically, as a good father must be, with the very desire of his child, and the fears and uncertainties that may environ it.  What he suggested, what he proposed and promised, what was partly planned to be afterward concluded in detail, did not transpire through that heavy closed door; neither we, nor the white-jacketed serving-man, can be at this moment the wiser.  It will appear hereafter.  When they came out together at last, Mr. Sherrett was saying,—­

“Two years, remember.  Not a word of it, decisively, till then,—­for both your sakes.”

“Let what will happen, father?  You don’t remember when you were young.”

“Don’t I?” said his father, with emphasis, and a kindly smile.  “If anything happens, come to me.  Meanwhile,—­you may talk, if you like, to Aunt Euphrasia.  I’ll trust her.”

And so the Lord set this angel of his to watch over this thread of our story.

We may leave it here for a while.

CHAPTER VII.

BEL AND BARTHOLOMEW.

“Kroo! kroo!  I’ve cramp in my legs,
Sitting so long atop of my eggs! 
Never a minute for rest to snatch;
I wonder when they are going to hatch!

“Cluck! cluck! listen! tseep! 
Down in the nest there’s a stir and a peep. 
Everything comes to its luck some day;
I’ve got chickens!  What will folks say?”

Bel Bree made that rhyme.  It came into her head suddenly one morning, sitting in her little bedroom window that looked right over the grass yard into the open barn-door, where the hens stalked in and out; and one, with three chickens, was at that minute airing herself and her family that had just come out of their shells into the world, and walked about already as if the great big world was only there, just as they had of course expected it to be.  The hen was the most astonished. She was just old enough to begin to be able to be astonished.  Her whole mind expressed itself in that proud cluck, and pert, excited carriage.  She had done a wonderful thing, and she didn’t know how she had done it.  Bel “read it like coarse print,”—­as her step-mother was wont to say of her own perspicacities,—­and put it into jingle, as she had a trick of doing with things.