ut I shan't shoot you. You're not _worth_ it--not _worth_ it. I
shan't even cane you, sir. You're too _old_--too _old_."

Penny looked at him, as much as to say he thought his point of view
was very sensible.

"But ee, bless me, my man, take off that complacent expression, or I
feel I may certainly smack your face."

Poor Penny, for once in a way, was rather at a loss, which was all
Salome desired, so he turned to me.

"Ray--I think _that_ was your detestable name--I shall now cane you.
Get _over_, my man--get _over_."

When the ceremony was completed, Salome talked to us so nicely,
although periodically asking us to bless him, that I told myself I
would never break bounds again; thereby making one of those good
resolutions which pave, we are told, another Beaten Track.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FREEDHAM REVELATIONS

Sec.1

The next half-holiday I was walking towards the tuck-shop and
gloomily deciding that Doe's wilful estrangement from me was fast
being frozen into tacit enmity, when I felt an arm tucked most
affectionately into mine. It was done so quietly and quickly that I
nearly leapt a yard at the shock. The arm belonged to Doe.

"Ray, you old ass," he began.

Doe, now sixteen, was not so very different from the small fawning
creature of three years before. Although the perfect curve of the
cheek-line had given place to a perceptible depression beneath the
cheek-bone; although the usual marks of a boy's adolescence--the
slight pallor, the quick blush of diffidence, the slimness of
limb--were all very noticeable in Doe, there was yet much of the
original Baby about his appearance. It could be marked in his soft,
indeterminate mouth, whose flower-like lips seemed always parted; in
his inquiring eyes and unkempt hair; and, at the present moment, in
an artless excitement that I had not seen for many a day.

I tried to drag my arm away, but he held it too tight, and proceeded
to make the remarkable statement:

"You old ass! Surely you've been sulking long enough."

"Well, I like that," replied I, with an empty laugh. "You drop me,
sulk like a pig, and then say it's the other way round--"

"Rot!" he interrupted. "Didn't you deliberately cut me out with
Radley?"

"I don't know what you mean," I said, although the hint that I was
Radley's favourite always gave me a flush of pleasure.

"And haven't you been hanging on to Penny, just to make me
jealous?"

"Never entered my head," I replied promptl