Nancy | Page 7

ladder, Bobby?" ask I, standing still.
"Difficult! Bless your heart, no! Why?"
"One can see nothing here," I answer. "I should like to climb up and sit on the top of the wall, where one can look about one."
My wish is easy of gratification. Bobby holds the ladder, and I climb cautiously, rung by rung. Having reached the summit, I sit at ease, with, my legs loosely dangling. There is no broken glass, there are no painful bottoms of bottles to disturb my ruminant quiet. The air bites a little, but I am warmly clad, and young. Bobby sits beside me, whistling and kicking the bricks with his heels. There is the indistinctness of fine weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon, giving them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack. As I sit, many small and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes mixed together; the brook's noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between the flat, dry March fields; the gray geese's noise, as they screech all together from the farm-yard; the church-bells' noise, as they ring out from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in the morning sun.
"Do you hear the bells?" say I. "Some one has been married this morning."
"Do not you wish it was you?" asks Bobby, with a brotherly grin.
"I should not mind," reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my finger and thumb. "It is about time for one of us to move off, is not it? And Barbara has made such a signal failure hitherto, that I think it is but fair that I should try my little possible."
"All I ask of you is," says Bobby, gravely, "not to take a fellow who has not got any shooting."
"I will make it a sine qua non," I answer, seriously.
A louder screech than ever from the geese, accompanied with wing-flappings. How unanimous they are! There is not a voice wanting.
"I wonder how long Sir Roger will stay?" I say presently.
"What connection of ideas made you think of him?" asks Bobby, curiously.
"Do you suppose that he has any shooting?"
I break into a laugh.
"I do not know, I am sure. I do not think it matters much whether he has or not."
"I dare say that there are a good many women--old ones, you know--who would take him, old as he is," says Bobby, with liberality.
"I dare say," I answer. "I do not know. I am not old, but I am not sure that I would not rather marry him than be an old maid."
A pause. Again I laugh--this time a laugh of recollection.
"What a fool you did look last night!" I say with sisterly candor, "when you put your head round the schoolroom door, and found that you had been witty about him to his face!"
Bobby reddens, and aims a bit of mortar at a round-eyed robin that has perched near us.
"At all events, I did not call him a beast"
"Well, never mind; do not get angry! What did it matter?" say I, comfortingly. "You did not mention his name. How could he tell that he was our benefactor? He did not even know that he was to be; and I begin to have misgivings about it myself."
"I cannot say that I see much sign of his putting his hand into his breeches-pocket," says Bobby, vulgarly.
There is the click of a lifted latch. We both look in the direction whence comes the sound. He of whom we speak is entering the garden by a distant door.
"Get down, Bobby!" cry I, hurriedly, "and help me down. Make haste! quick! I would not have him find me perched up here for worlds"
Bobby gets down as nimbly as a monkey. I prepare to do likewise.
"Hold it steady!" I cry nervously, and, so saying, begin to turn round and to stretch out one leg, with the intention of making a graceful descent backward.
"Stop!" cries Bobby from the bottom, with a diabolical chuckle. "I think you observed just now that I looked a fool last night! perhaps you will not mind trying how it feels!"
So saying, he seizes the ladder--a light and short one--and makes off with it. I cry, "Bobby! Bobby!" suppressedly, several times, but I need hardly say that my appeal is addressed to deaf ears. I remain sitting on the wall-top, trying to look as if I did not mind, while grave misgivings possess my soul as to the extent of strong boot and ankle that my unusual situation leaves visible. Once the desperate idea of jumping presents itself to my mind, but the ground looks so distant, and the height so great, that my heart fails me.
From my watch-tower I trace the progress of Sir Roger between the fruit-trees. As yet, he has not seen