To this remark the boy replied, "Hullo!" Oswald now did not know what to say. The sorrier you are for people the harder it is to tell them so. But at last he said-- "I've just heard about your father being where he is. It's beastly rough luck. I hope you don't mind my saying I'm jolly sorry for you." The boy had a pale face and watery blue eyes. When Oswald said this his eyes got waterier than ever, and he climbed down to the ground before he said-- "I don't care so much, but it do upset mother something crool." It is awfully difficult to console those in affliction. Oswald thought this, then he said-- "I say; never mind if those beastly kids won't play with you. It isn't your fault, you know." "Nor it ain't father's neither," the boy said; "he broke his arm a-falling off of a rick, and he hadn't paid up his club money along of mother's new baby costing what it did when it come, so there warn't nothing--and what's a hare or two, or a partridge? It ain't as if it was pheasants as is as dear to rear as chicks." Oswald did not know what to say, so he got out his new pen-and-pencil-combined and said-- "Look here! You can have this to keep if you like." The pale-eyed boy took it and looked at it and said-- "You ain't foolin' me?" And Oswald said no he wasn't, but he felt most awfully rum and uncomfy, and though he wanted most frightfully to do something for the boy he felt as if he wanted to get away more than anything else, and he never was gladder in his life than when he saw Dora coming along, and she said-- "You go back and play, Oswald. I'm tired and I'd like to sit down a bit." She got the boy to sit down beside her, and Oswald went back to the others. Games, however unusually splendid, have to come to an end. And when the games were over and it was tea, and the village children were sent away, and Oswald went to call Dora and the prisoner's son, he found nothing but Dora, and he saw at once, in his far-sighted way, that she had been crying. It was one of the A1est days we ever had, and the drive home was good, but Dora was horribly quiet, as though the victim of dark interior thoughts. And the next day she was but little better. We were all paddling on the sands, but Dora would not. And presently Alice left us and went back to Dora, and we all saw across the sandy waste that something was up. And presently Alice came down and said-- "Dry your feet and legs and come to a council. Dora wants to tell you something." We dried our pink and sandy toes and we came to the council. Then Alice said: "I don't think H.O. is wanted at the council, it isn't anything amusing; you go and enjoy yourself by the sea, and catch the nice little crabs, H.O. dear." H.O. said: "You always want me to be out of everything. I can be councils as well as anybody else." "Oh, H.O.!" said Alice, in pleading tones, "not if I give you a halfpenny to go and buy bulls-eyes with?" So then he went, and Dora said--