“What is it?” he asked, trying to rise, and looking at it again wonderingly. “Oh, father,” he pleaded, “don’t tell mother ’bout the blood—take me down to Sallie Tom’s cabin—don’t let mother see it—you can do anything you want with me, father,” he continued, and he tried hard to look up bravely in the latter’s face, “only don’t let mother know I am hurt, and don’t punish Peter Black. I made him do it—he didn’t want to, and he’s mine, you know father, and you haven’t the right.” He watched his father’s face eagerly. “Promise me,” he cried, “promise me.” And though his father had an intense desire to see Peter Black soundly thrashed, he knew he had no right to do it, for he had simply obeyed his little master, as he himself had ordered him to do. Up at the house there was great excitement when it was known that Bobbie’s nose was broken, and more than ever was his sway over the household absolute and entire, as he lay for a few days a prisoner in his little bed, waiting for the great surgeon from the North to come down and make it all straight and well again. That night his mother knelt by his bed and held him passionately to her heart and thanked God that he was still her own, and then she asked him what he most wanted to play with while he was waiting to get well, and his answer brought the first tiny twinge of jealousy of which she had ever been conscious. “I want Dorothy, mother,” he said, putting his arms around her neck in his old sweet, baby way. “I want Dorothy most of all. I’m sorry she ain’t a boy as big as me—but maybe I’ll be glad she is a girl when she gets bigger—for I’ll have to have a sweetheart, won’t I, mother?” But before she could answer he was fast asleep in her arms. The seed, however, had fallen on fruitful ground, and with a sigh of which she was half ashamed, his mother began to think it would not be so very long before her realm in her boy’s heart would be invaded, and she no longer reign supreme. The same night she told her husband of Bobbie’s wish, and also what he had said, and together they laughed at the way he regarded the inevitability of a sweetheart, and though neither said anything more, it seemed too absurd to discuss children scarce seven and three years old—still the idea took root, and the hope was born that some day Bobbie and Dorothy would keep up the life in the big house when they were growing old, or when, perchance, they had passed away. [Illustration: “Louder and louder sounded the hoof-beats.”]