re to come home and change your clothes for dinner."

"I'll come in a minute," said Dicky, "if you'll stand here and wait."

He might be called by that word again; and without knowing why, he
dreaded her hearing it. She waited while he trotted forward, nerving
himself to face the crowd again. Lo! when he reached the booth, all the
bystanders had melted away. The bird-seller was covering up his cages
with loose wrappers, making ready to pack up for the night.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully. "Thought I'd lost you for good."

He took the child's money and handed the canary cage across the sill;
also the bird-whistle, wrapped in a scrap of paper. Many times in the
course of a career which brought him much fighting and some little fame,
Dicky Vyell remembered this his first lesson in courage--that if you
walk straight up to an enemy, as likely as not you find him vanished.

But he had not quite reached the end of his alarms. As he took the
cage, a parrot at the back of the booth uplifted his voice and
squawked,--

"No prerogative! No prerogative! No prerogative!"

"You mustn't mind _him_," said the bird-seller genially. "He's like the
crowd--picks up a cry an' harps on it without understandin'."

Master Dicky understood it no better; but thanked the man and ran off,
prize in hand, to rejoin the girl.

They hurried back to the Inn. At the gateway she paused.

"I let you say what was wrong just now," she explained. "Your father
didn't give me that money for putting out the fire."

Here she hesitated. Dicky could not think what it mattered, or why her
voice was so timid.

"Oh," said he carelessly, "I dare say it was just because he liked you.
Father has plenty of money."

Chapter IV.

FATHER AND SON.

The dinner set before Captain Vyell comprised a dish of oysters, a fish
chowder, a curried crab, a fried fowl with white sauce, a saddle of
tenderest mutton, and various sweets over which Manasseh had thrown the
elegant flourishes of his art. The wine came from the Rhone valley--a
Hermitage of the Collector's own shipment. The candles that lit the
repast stood in the Collector's own silver candlesticks. As an old
Roman general carried with him on foreign service, packed in panniers on
mule-back, a tessellated pavement to be laid down for him at each
camping halt and repacked when the troops moved forward, so did Captain
Vyell on his progresses of inspection travel with all the apparatus of a