His mother might
have realised it had she been there--but she was not. Mary, however, was
there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was
always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She
slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she
always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he
could so easily hurt her, said:

"Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?"

"I don't care," he answered gruffly.

"It isn't any fun without you." She paused, and added: "Would you mind
if I stayed here too?"

"I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her,
determined, as he was, that she should never know it!

"I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed, with that melancholy stare
through her large spectacles that always irritated Jeremy, out across
the garden.

"I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I can't
get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate the
Dean's Ernest?"

"Yes, I do," she answered fervently, although she had not thought about
him at all--enough for her that Jeremy should hate him! Then she gasped:
"Here he comes--"

He was walking towards them with a swagger of his long yellow neck
and his thin leggy body that Jeremy found especially offensive. Jeremy
"bristled," and Mary was conscious of that bristling.

"Hallo!" said Ernest.

"Hallo!" said Jeremy.

"What rot these silly games are!" said Ernest. "Why can't they have
something decent, like cricket?"

Jeremy had never played cricket, so he said nothing. "At our school,"
said Ernest, "we're very good at cricket. We win all our matches
always--"

"I don't care about your school," said Jeremy, breathing through his
nose.

The Dean's Ernest was obviously surprised by this; he had not expected
it. His pale neck began to flush.

"Look here, young Cole," he said, "none of your cheek."

This was a new dialect to Jeremy, who had no friends who went to school.
All he said, however, breathing more fiercely than before, was: "I don't
care--"

"Oh, don't you?" said Ernest. "Now, look here--" Then he paused,
apparently uncertain, for a moment, of his courage. The sight of Mary's
timorous anxiety, however, reassured him, and he continued: "It's all
right for you, this sort of thing. You ought to be in the nursery with
your old podge-faced nurse. Kids like you oughtn't to be allowed out of
their prams."

"I don't car