or my eyes, but neither is
good enough for the youths of Longpuddle," he said.

"No, not that exactly, Dick. Still, you see, I do want--to look pretty
to them--there, that's honest! But I sha'n't be much longer."

"How much?"

"A quarter of an hour."

"Very well; I'll come in in a quarter of an hour."

"Why go away?"

"I mid as well."

He went out, walked down the road, and sat upon a gate. Here he
meditated and meditated, and the more he meditated the more decidedly did
he begin to fume, and the more positive was he that his time had been
scandalously trifled with by Miss Fancy Day--that, so far from being the
simple girl who had never had a sweetheart before, as she had solemnly
assured him time after time, she was, if not a flirt, a woman who had had
no end of admirers; a girl most certainly too anxious about her frocks; a
girl, whose feelings, though warm, were not deep; a girl who cared a
great deal too much how she appeared in the eyes of other men. "What she
loves best in the world," he thought, with an incipient spice of his
father's grimness, "is her hair and complexion. What she loves next
best, her gowns and hats; what she loves next best, myself, perhaps!"

Suffering great anguish at this disloyalty in himself and harshness to
his darling, yet disposed to persevere in it, a horribly cruel thought
crossed his mind. He would not call for her, as he had promised, at the
end of a quarter of an hour! Yes, it would be a punishment she well
deserved. Although the best part of the afternoon had been wasted he
would go nutting as he had intended, and go by himself.

He leaped over the gate, and pushed up the lane for nearly two miles,
till a winding path called Snail-Creep sloped up a hill and entered a
hazel copse by a hole like a rabbit's burrow. In he plunged, vanished
among the bushes, and in a short time there was no sign of his existence
upon earth, save an occasional rustling of boughs and snapping of twigs
in divers points of Grey's Wood.

Never man nutted as Dick nutted that afternoon. He worked like a galley
slave. Half-hour after half-hour passed away, and still he gathered
without ceasing. At last, when the sun had set, and bunches of nuts
could not be distinguished from the leaves which nourished them, he
shouldered his bag, containing quite two pecks of the finest produce of
the wood, about as much use to him as two pecks of stones from the road,
strolled down the woodland track,