When the day came that it was remembered, no one believed his declaration of not having “meant anything”—of not having intended to do anybody any harm. When every creature in the house treated him like a pariah, and avoided him as though he had leprosy, Harry felt that he could better have endured a dozen worse thrashings than such social ostracism. When his assertions were received with silent incredulity—when his questions were answered reluctantly and with withering disdain and dislike—when his food was handed to him as if he were some unclean animal, unfit to eat or associate with civilized beings—when there was a great silence in the house—when people went about on tiptoe, and, if they met the boy, passed him either with averted heads or with looks of reproach and anger—when Leonard turned king’s evidence and bore testimony against him—when he sat in his own room, or else wandered about the farm, kicking twigs and stones listlessly before him—Harry felt it was all more than he could bear, and, turning at last on Cuthbert, told that youth he did not see why they were all so hard upon him. “You were not a bit better, any one of you, when you were young,” he finished, passionately. “_We_ did not try to kill people,” answered his step-brother, with dignity, as he retreated from the room, followed by Harry’s indignant remonstrance of— “No more didn’t I—no more didn’t I!” CHAPTER III. HEATHER’S DARLING. It was late in the autumn, as I have said; the leaves were falling rapidly, and, but for the constant sweeping and supervision of “the boys,” the walks and lawns at Berrie Down would have been littered with the decaying foliage. As it was, barrowful after barrowful of dead leaves disappeared from the grass in front of the drawing-room windows, and often as not Lally sat on the top of the load which Alick or Cuthbert wheeled away to a corner of the kitchen-garden, and there deposited in a great heap to make leaf-mould for the next year’s geraniums. No more pride than Lally had these young Dudleys. If work were not to them prayer, it was, at all events, pleasure. It would have been a weary life to those lads, lounging about the Hollow, taking purposeless walks, rising in the morning to do nothing, going to bed at night after having performed no task, executed no duty; but, as matters stood, each season brought its labours with it to them. They loved the place, and they loved Heather, and they loved work. What need is there to say more? because of all these reasons, Berrie Down looked the Berrie Down we have visited.