about all day. She, good girl, never said one word of
impatience, but bore it all with the sweetest good humour; but her mother
now and then spoke severely for Alfred's own good, and then he made
himself more miserable than ever, and thought she was unkind and harsh,
and that he was very much to be pitied for having a mother who could not
bear with her poor sick boy. He was treating his mother as he was
treating his Father in Heaven.

How Harold fared with him may easily be guessed--how the poor boy could
hardly speak or step without being moaned at, till he was almost turned
out of his own house; and his mother did not know what to do, for Alfred
was really very ill, and fretting made him worse, and nothing could be so
bad for his brother as being driven out from home, to spend the long
summer evenings as he could.

Ellen would have been thankful now, had Paul Blackthorn been the worst
company into which Harold fell. Not that Paul was a bit cleaner; on the
contrary, each day could not fail to make him worse, till, as Ellen had
once said, you might almost grow a crop of radishes upon his shoulders.

Mrs. King's kind offer of washing his shirt had come to nothing. She
asked Harold about it, and had for answer, 'Do you think he would, after
the way you served him?'

Either he was affronted, or he was ashamed of her seeing his rags, or,
what was not quite impossible, there was no shirt at all in the case; and
he had a sturdy sort of independence about him, that made him always turn
surly at any notion of anything being done for him for charity.

How or why he stayed on with the farmer was hard to guess, for he had
very scanty pay, and rough usage; the farmer did not like him; the
farmer's wife scolded him constantly, and laid on his shoulders all the
mischief that was done about the place; and the shuffler gave him half
his own work to do, and hunted him about from dawn till past sunset. He
was always going at the end of every week, but never gone; perhaps he had
undergone too much in his wanderings, to be ready to begin them again; or
perhaps either Caesar or Harold, one or both, kept him at Friarswood. And
there might be another reason, too, for no one had ever spoken to him
like Mr. Cope. Very few had ever thrown him a kindly word, or seemed to
treat him like a thing with feelings, and those few had been rough and
unmannerly; but Mr. Cope's good-natured smile and pleasant manner had
been a very different thin