eterminedly,
"but you didna. You said to us, 'Think shame,' you said, 'to be
playing vulgar games when you could be reading superior books.' They
were his very words, were they no, man?" she demanded of her unhappy
husband, with a threatening look.

"They were," said Corp, in deepest gloom.

"I must get to the bottom of this," said Tommy, rising, "and as you
are too great a coward, Corp, to tell the truth with that shameless
woman glowering at you, out you go, Gavinia, and take your disgraced
bairn with you. Do as you are told, you besom, for I am Captain Stroke
again."

Corp was choking with delight as Gavinia withdrew haughtily. "I was
sure you would sort her," he said, rubbing his hands, "I was sure you
wasna the kind to be ashamed o' auld friends."

"But what does it mean?"

"She has a notion," Corp explained, growing grave again, "that it
wouldna do for you to own the like o' us. 'We mauna cheapen him,' she
said. She wanted you to see that we hinna been cheapening you." He
said, in a sepulchral voice, "There has been leddies here, and they
want to ken what Thomas Sandys was like as a boy. It's me they speir
for, but Gavinia she just shoves me out o' sight, and says she, 'Leave
them to me.'"

Corp told Tommy some of the things Gavinia said about Thomas Sandys as
a boy: how he sat rapt in church, and, instead of going bird-nesting,
lay on the ground listening to the beautiful little warblers overhead,
and gave all his pennies to poorer children, and could repeat the
Shorter Catechism, beginning at either end, and was very respectful to
the aged and infirm, and of a yielding disposition, and said, from his
earliest years, "I don't want to be great; I just want to be good."

"How can she make them all up?" Tommy asked, with respectful homage to
Gavinia.

Corp, with his eye on the door, produced from beneath the bed a little
book with coloured pictures. It was entitled "Great Boyhoods," by
"Aunt Martha." "She doesna make them up," he whispered; "she gets them
out o' this."

"And you back her up, Corp, even when she says I was not your friend!"

"It was like a t' knife intil me," replied loyal Corp; "every time I
forswore you it was like a t' knife, but I did it, ay, and I'll go on
doing it if you think my friendship cheapens you."

Tommy was much moved, and gripped his old lieutenant by the hand. He
also called Gavinia ben, and, before she could ward him off, the
masterful rogue had saluted her on the che