"Do you remember what made me call him a cad? It was that I met him carrying a great bundle of wood--little wood they call it--along the street one day. Well, just fancy, grandmother, _I've_ been doing it too. That's what I wanted to stay later for this afternoon."
Grandmother's heart gave a bound of pleasure at her boy's frankness. "Sensible child Sylvia is," she said to herself. But aloud she replied with a smile,
"Carrying wood! what did you do that for, and where did you get it?"
"I'll tell you, I'll tell you all about it," said Ralph. "We went out after school to a sort of little coppice where there is a lot of that nice dry brushwood that anybody may take. Prosper knew the place, and took me. It was to please him I went. He does it every Thursday; that is the day we are let out of school early."
"And what does he do it for?" asked grandmother. "Is he--are his people so very poor that he has to do it? I thought all the boys were of a better class," she added, with some inward misgiving as to what Mr. Heriott might say as to his son's present companions.
"Oh, so they are--at least they are not what you would call poor," said Ralph. "Prosper belongs to quite rich people. But he's an orphan; he lives with his uncle, and I suppose he's not rich--Prosper himself, I mean--for he says his uncle's always telling him to work hard at school, as he will have to fight his way in the world. He has got a little room up at the top of the house, and that's what put it into his head about the wood. There's an old woman, who was once a sort of a lady, who lives in the next room to his. You get up by a different stair; it's really a different house, but once, somehow, the top rooms were joined, and there's still a door between Prosper's room and this old woman's, and one morning early he heard her crying--she was really _crying_, grandmother, she's so old and shaky, he says--because she couldn't get her fire to light. He didn't know what she was crying for at first, but he peeped through the keyhole and saw her fumbling away with damp paper and stuff that wouldn't light the big logs. So he thought and thought what he could do--he hasn't any money hardly--and at last he thought he'd go and see what he could find. And he found a _beautiful_ place for brushwood, and he carried back all he could, and since then every Thursday he goes out to that place. But, of course, one fellow alone can't carry much, and you should have seen how pleased he was when I said I'd go with him. But I thought I'd better tell you. You don't mind, grandmother?"