as before, a
fact which he grasped and puzzled over for a moment, before exclaiming,
"Bother!" and, after listening at the head of the stairs, he rushed up
into his work-room with the blankets.

That seemed to him to be all that he could do, till it occurred to him
that the room felt hot and stuffy, so he threw open the window,
fastening back the casement, and stood gazing out at a great rugged old
Scotch fir not many feet away, one apparently of great age, and which
cut off a part of the view over the undulating greenery of the forest.

Quite satisfied now, and with a sigh of relief, the boy went out to the
landing, carefully locked the door and pocketed the key.

"Let 'em think," he muttered with a grim smile upon his lips, "it's a
curiosity I found in the woods."

By this time he was down in the gallery and passing his own chamber,
where he stopped short, bringing himself up with the ejaculation--

"Oh! Bella will be at me about the blankets! Bother! What shall I
say? Tell her to mind her own business," he cried half-savagely; and as
if to get away from his thoughts he ran down into the hall, snatched his
cap from the stand, and then hurried away for the woods.

But it was not in his ordinary free and careless fashion, for his
thoughts haunted him, and every now and then he kept turning round as if
fancying that he was followed. Now his eyes were directed back at the
old ivy-covered house, where he expected to see the maid watching him
from one of the windows. Soon after, when the Manor was hidden by the
clustering oaks that were scattered park-like among the fields, he was
looking over his left shoulder to see if that was the fat village
constable in the distance bending down so as to creep along unobserved,
and not one of his father's mouse-coloured cows.

Hurrying on, and right into the forest, his next fancy was that he heard
a distant shout, one that was answered, though it might have been an
echo, and his heart beat a little faster as he set both sounds down to
soldiers searching among the trees and hallooing to one another so as to
keep in touch.

"Oh, I say," he muttered to himself, as he proceeded, keeping to the
densest portions of the forest, and doubling the labour in threading his
way, "who could have thought that it would make one feel so queer? I
haven't done anything--at least, nothing much--to mind, and here am I
feeling as if I had been guilty of nobody knows what. No wonder that
po