The game, played on a certain sunny half holiday, was just beginning, when Master Caleb and I set off for Morechester. I remember looking back wistfully at the ground, and seeing how smooth and inviting it looked in the sunshine. The players were just crossing the field for an 'over,' and Cuthbert was walking by himself rather sulkily, for he and I had quarrelled that morning about my going so often with Master Caleb. He said that I did not care for cricket any more, or for him, or for anything but poking about after the schoolmaster. His injustice stung me deeply; for, to tell the truth, long walks with Master Caleb were not the same things now-a-days that they had once been. He had taken to stalking along in a brown study, with his hands behind his back, and I, carrying the basket, had to follow silently behind. I would fain have been somewhere at home with Cuthbert, only I could not tell Master Caleb so. 'If you only knew all,' I said rather grandly to Cuthbert, and then stopped short, afraid of letting out the secret. Cuthbert laughed scornfully, and I walked another way. So we had quarrelled. The little house in Minster-yard became quite familiar to me. I almost wondered why Master Caleb cared to go there so often. His visits must have given him more pain than pleasure, for he generally left me to talk to Mistress Dorothy in the parlour, while he shut himself up in the study with the Professor. Anxious as he was about the safe-keeping of his secret, from no one did he guard it more carefully than from Dorothy herself. He was always fancying--most needlessly--that she was on the point of finding it out. And then of course she would never speak to him again. So he rarely said much to her, but listened with strained attention to her father's discourse, when he would have given the world only just to sit still and look at her. Then, when he had scarcely allowed himself a look or a smile, he went home with a heavy heart to his hard work, and tried to throw himself with all his might into spelling-books and the multiplication table. It was an odd life that Professor Bruce's little daughter lived, in the dark rooms among the books. She rarely saw anybody except now and then some old friend of her father's--some one just as learned as himself, who came to Morechester for the day, to talk over a scientific question with him, and who paid Mistress Dorothy grandly-worded, old-world compliments about her 'sweet eyes,' and her 'dishes of good tea.'