"I find, Mr. Pennybet, that, when you were breaking bounds, you should have been with your _company_--your _company_, sir--at shooting practice. It's _desertion_, sir--and punishable by _death_. But I shan't shoot you. You're not _worth_ it--not _worth_ it. I shan't even cane you, sir. You're too _old_--too _old_." Penny looked at him, as much as to say he thought his point of view was very sensible. "But ee, bless me, my man, take off that complacent expression, or I feel I may certainly smack your face." Poor Penny, for once in a way, was rather at a loss, which was all Salome desired, so he turned to me. "Ray--I think _that_ was your detestable name--I shall now cane you. Get _over_, my man--get _over_." When the ceremony was completed, Salome talked to us so nicely, although periodically asking us to bless him, that I told myself I would never break bounds again; thereby making one of those good resolutions which pave, we are told, another Beaten Track. CHAPTER VIII THE FREEDHAM REVELATIONS Sec.1 The next half-holiday I was walking towards the tuck-shop and gloomily deciding that Doe's wilful estrangement from me was fast being frozen into tacit enmity, when I felt an arm tucked most affectionately into mine. It was done so quietly and quickly that I nearly leapt a yard at the shock. The arm belonged to Doe. "Ray, you old ass," he began. Doe, now sixteen, was not so very different from the small fawning creature of three years before. Although the perfect curve of the cheek-line had given place to a perceptible depression beneath the cheek-bone; although the usual marks of a boy's adolescence--the slight pallor, the quick blush of diffidence, the slimness of limb--were all very noticeable in Doe, there was yet much of the original Baby about his appearance. It could be marked in his soft, indeterminate mouth, whose flower-like lips seemed always parted; in his inquiring eyes and unkempt hair; and, at the present moment, in an artless excitement that I had not seen for many a day. I tried to drag my arm away, but he held it too tight, and proceeded to make the remarkable statement: "You old ass! Surely you've been sulking long enough." "Well, I like that," replied I, with an empty laugh. "You drop me, sulk like a pig, and then say it's the other way round--" "Rot!" he interrupted. "Didn't you deliberately cut me out with Radley?" "I don't know what you mean," I said, although the hint that I was Radley's favourite always gave me a flush of pleasure. "And haven't you been hanging on to Penny, just to make me jealous?" "Never entered my head," I replied promptly, and with truth. "I leave that sort of thing to schoolgirls like you. But it evidently did make you jealous." "_Yes_, it did," he admitted with an engaging smile. This softened me; and my affection for him began at once to throb into activity.