ertheless brought his innocent deed
home to him as nothing had done before, that the artificial frost broke
up, and real tears ran with his ink. He begged Lettice not to think too
hardly of him, still less to be anxious about him, or to make anybody
else; they must not fret for him, he wrote more than once, without seeing
the humour of the injunction. He was better than he had been for years,
and in the best of hands. But something terrible had happened; something
he could not help, but would bitterly repent all his days, especially as
it might prevent him from ever seeing any of them again. It was this
monstrous remark, and others to which it led, that were literally blotted
with the writer's tears. But just then he saw himself in all vivid
sincerity as an outcast who could never show himself at home or at school
again. And it required the spell of Baumgartner's presence to make the
prospect such as could be borne with the least degree of visible manhood.

Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, but a boy in many ways
younger than most boys of sixteen and three quarters, albeit older in some
few. He was old in imagination, but young in common sense. One may be
imaginative and still have a level head, but it is least likely in one's
teens. The particular temperament does not need a label; but none who
know it when they see it, and who see it here, will be surprised to learn
that this emotional writer for one was enormously relieved and lightened
in spirit when he had got his letter off his mind and hands.

True to his warning, Dr. Baumgartner began to glance at it with a kindly
gravity; it was with something else that he shook his head over the second
leaf.

"This is not for me to read!" said he. "I'd rather run the risk of
trusting your discretion."

No words could have enslaved poor Pocket more completely; he clasped the
hand that proceeded to write the covering note, and then the address, all
openly before his eyes. And while the doctor was gone to the nearest
messenger office to despatch the missive to the General Post Office,
ostensibly to catch a particular post, his prisoner would not have
decamped for a hundred pounds, and the doctor knew it.

Phillida did not appear at dinner, but at supper she did, and Pocket was
only less uncomfortable in her absence, which he felt he had caused, than
when they were both at table and he unable to say another word to express
his sorrow for the unseemly sc