and he felt that he was always watched. When he took the cord from the back-kitchen one of the maids was peering after him down the passage, and his mother found him trying to bind a large log of wood to the trunk of one of the trees. She wanted to know what he was doing, and whether he could not find some more sensible amusement, and he stared at her with his heavy white face. He knew that he was under observation, and so he worked at night. The two servant girls who slept in the next room often awoke, fancying they heard a queer sort of noise, a "chink-chink," as one of them described the sensation, but they could not make out what it was.
And at last he was ready. He was "loafing about" one afternoon, and he happened to meet Charlotte Emery, a little girl of twelve, the daughter of a neighbour. Harry flushed to a dull burning red.
"Come for a walk with me to the Beeches?" he said. "I wish you would."
"Oh, I mustn't, Harry. Mother wouldn't like it."
"Do come. I've got a new game; grand fun."
"Is it really? What sort of game is it?"
"I can't show you here. Just walk on towards the Beeches, and I'll follow you directly. I knew you would."
Harry ran full tilt to the hiding-place where he had bestowed his apparatus. He soon overtook Charlotte, and the two went off together towards the Beeches, a lonely wooded hill, a mile away. The boy's father would have been astonished if he could have seen him; Harry was glowing and burning with that dull red colour, but he laughed as he walked beside Charlotte.
When they were alone together in the wood, Charlotte said:
