ld."

"Thank ye," said Frank warmly; "but how am I to tell him that?"

Andrew turned and gave his companion a peculiar smiling look.

"Of course," he said merrily, "how can you tell him? He did not tell
you how to write to him--oh, no; nor where to find the letters he sent
to you. Oh, no; he wouldn't do that. Not at all likely, is it?"

Frank turned white.

"How did you know that?" he said hoarsely.

"Because I'm rowing in the same boat, Franky. Why, of course he did.
Now, didn't he?"

The boy nodded.

"So did my father, of course. There, I'm going to thoroughly trust you,
if you don't me. I'd trust you with anything, because I can feel that
you couldn't go wrong. I don't want you to tell me where your father
told you to write, or what name he is going to take, or how you are to
get his letters, for of course he couldn't write to the Palace. But he
told you how to communicate with him, I do know, Frank. It was a matter
of course with your father like that. I say, what do you think of a tin
box in a hollow tree in the Park, where you can bury it in the touchwood
when you go to feed the ducks?"

"That would be a good way of course," said Frank; "but no, it isn't like
that."

"What, for you and your father? Who said it was? I meant for me and
mine."

"What! Feed the ducks! Drew!" cried Frank excitedly.

"Yes; what's the matter?"

"Feed the ducks?"

"Yes, feed the ducks!"

"You don't mean to tell me that--that--"

"Mr George Selby is my father? Of course I do."

"Oh!" ejaculated Frank in astonishment.

"Isn't it fine?" cried Andrew. "He comes and feeds the ducks--his
Majesty King George's ducks--and the precious spies stand and watch him;
and sometimes he has a chance to see me, and sometimes he hasn't, and
then he leaves a note for me in the old tree, for he says it's the only
pleasure he has in his solitary exiled life."

"Oh, Drew!" cried Frank warmly.

"Yes, poor old chap. I'm not worth thinking about so much, only I
suppose I'm something like what poor mother was, and he likes it, or he
wouldn't leave all his plots and plans for getting poor James Francis on
the throne to come risking arrest. They'd make short work of him,
Frank, if they knew--head shorter. I shall tell him I've told you. But
I know what he'll say."

"That you were much to blame," said Frank eagerly.

"Not he. He'll trust you, as I do. He likes you, Frank. He told me he
liked you all the better for b