"He is not ill."

"Then why don't you ask him about the bullocks?

He knows a deal better about them than a stockbroker. You ask too much advice, Squire; and, what is more, take too little."

CHAPTER XXI.

JAMES HAS A WET WALK.

"STAND there," said Dora, "and I will show you how it all was. You are not quite in the right place yet. You must stand close to the fire, with your hands spread out, blinking your eyes. There, that is just exactly the way you stood on the very first night in that very same place, with all the dogs round you, and your face all bleeding and bruised, and your dirty little cap in your hand, and your dirty little smock-frock all over mud; and you looked such a poor little mite of a thing that I cried about you when I went upstairs, and was peevish with Anne because she wanted to go on with the silly play about Esquimaux."

James Sugden stood for a few minutes looking into

the fire, without answering. He had grown to be a very handsome upstanding young fellow indeed; with more than the usual share of physical beauty, and a remarkably clear resolute pair of eyes. There was also a dexterous rapid grace about all his movements, not generally observable in sixth form hobbedehoy youths. He still wore the uniform of St. Mary's, and was in age about seventeen,

For the first time he had been invited by the Squire to spend his Midsummer vacation at Silcotes and join Algernon's children in their yearly holidays at their grandfather's grand house. He had hitherto spent all his vacations since the removal of the school in Lancaster Square; and the summer vacation had been very dull to him; for Dora and Reginald, with the younger ones, had always been at Silcotes. He, had been condemned to drag on the burning long summer days alone with Algernon and Miss Lee, and had always longed intensely for the time to come to return to school. This year, however, Mr. Betts had written to him to say that he was to render himself at Silcotes by five o'clock on the twentieth of June without fail. So, committing his box to an

intricate system of cross country carriers-each of whom was supposed to meet the other without fail at obscure villages, and remember a vast number of obscure directions-he had said good-bye to his old friend, Ben Berry, the porter, and, taking only an ordnance map and his sketch-book, had started from St. Mary's by the Lake early in the summer's morning, with his face set straight towards Silcotes. "Only two half-counties to walk through, before the afternoon, my Ben," he said on starting. "Not much that, hey! Not so bad as the journey down here."

A resolute young fellow enough. A Silcote could not have been more resolute. The glory of the day waned as he walked stoutly on, until he saw his familiar old Boisey in the hazy dim distance at noon. The distance was very hazy, and the air was very close and hot, yet he held on through a country utterly strange to him, choosing always, by that geographical genius which one sees in some men, but not in very many, the roads which would suit his purpose, and end somewhere; in preference to those, apparently as much traffic-worn as the others, which only delude one by leading to the parsonage house

and the church. The course was north-east, and the great Alps of thunder-cloud, creeping up through the brown haze, had met him and were overhead when, having crossed the infant Loddon at Wildmoor, and having delayed to pick, for Dora, a nosegay of the beautiful geums and orchises, which to him, coming from the heath-country, seemed so rare and so rich, he turned into the deep clay lanes towards the heath.

By this time every one was getting to shelter, and the thunder was loud. The landlord of a little roadside inn he passed urged him to stay, and not go aloft on the desolate open heath, where a man had been killed by the lightning not long before. But weather mattered little to the shepherd lad, and he pleasantly declined, saying, that "he had not time." The landlord looked curiously and admiringly after the swift-footed pleasant-looking young gentleman as he sprang up the steep ascent towards the thunder; but James never paused, although the storm came down fiercely now, and Boisey was hidden from him completely. In Bramshill Park, the lightning was leaping and blazing all around him, lighting up the dense cloud of rain in every direction, and once, with