“Our good time was soon over. It was the turnpike-keeper who did the mischief. He had seen me come down to the cottage, and he couldn’t resist the reward they offered early next morning to any one who caught me. He sent up a message to the school, and at nine o’clock the master and two policemen walked into the house. Nelly didn’t try to fight this time, but she spoke up and told them it was all her doing and neither mine nor Uncle Jonas’s. She told them that she had brought Mag to see me all the way from home, and that she was sure I wouldn’t run away any more if I might have Mag with me there. “It was well for me that my wonderful Nelly kept her senses and could use her tongue, for my luck began to turn from that time forwards. The sergeant of police patted her on the head, and took Mag’s cage himself; and the other policeman put into his pocket the handcuffs he had begun to fasten on my wrists, saying they were ‘too big for such a kid;’ and even the master said that though I was in a bad scrape, he would speak for me to the magistrates. “So we went back in procession to the school after I had kissed Nelly, and my clothes had been dug up in the garden, brushed, and put on me again; and when they locked me up in the whitewashed cell, where refractory boys were confined, the sergeant winked at the master, and put Mag’s cage in with me. When the labour-master unlocked the door to give me my dinner of bread and water, he brought something for Mag, and said a kind word to both of us. “I was quite happy in Mag’s company all that day and night. Nelly’s pluck had made a man of me, in spite of all her fine schemes being upset. And I had a sort of dim hope that the magistrate, who was coming to see the runaway boy, might bring me some kind of good luck. “Next morning I heard a carriage drive up, and in a few minutes I heard the key put into the lock. I stood up, and put my hands behind me, as we were always made to do when visitors arrived. Mag’s cage was on the floor at my feet. “The door opened, and there stood the long-lost gentleman who had given me the sovereign, looking down on me with the same pleasant face and the same lively blue eyes! He recognised me at once; to him it was but the other day that I had caught his horse for him; but it had been long years of misery and disgrace to me. But he had been in London and in foreign parts, and had never thought of me since then—so he told me afterwards. “‘Why, who’s this, and where’s my change?’ he said at once. ‘Didn’t I ask you if I could trust you? And how did you come _here_, I wonder, with that honest face?’ “It was too much for me, and for all the pluck I had got from Mag and Nelly, I burst into a fit of crying, and leant against the wall, heaving and sobbing. ‘The groom never came,’ was all I could get out at last. “‘Bring me a chair here, Mr. Reynolds,’ said he, ‘and leave me alone with him. I know this boy.’