Perhaps Mr. Carleton felt it so, for after his first expression of pleasure he stood silently and gravely looking for a long time. Little Fleda's eye loved it too, but she looked her fill and then sat down on a stone to await her companion's pleasure, glancing now and then up at his face which gave her no encouragement to interrupt him. It was gravely and even gloomily thoughtful. He stood so long without stirring that poor Fleda began to have sad thoughts of the possibility of gathering all the nuts from the hickory trees, and she heaved a very gentle sigh once or twice; but the dark blue eye which she with reason admired remained fixed on the broad scene below, as if it were reading or trying to read there a difficult lesson. And when at last he turned and began to go up the path again he kept the same face, and went moodily swinging his arm up and down, as if in disturbed thought. Fleda was too happy to be moving to care for her companion's silence; she would have compounded for no more conversation so they might but reach the nut trees. But before they had got quite so far Mr. Carleton broke the silence, speaking in precisely the same tone and manner he had used the last time.
"Look here, Fairy," said he, pointing to a small heap of chestnut burs piled at the foot of a tree,--"here's a little fortune for you already."
"That's a squirrel!" said Fleda, looking at the place very attentively.
"There has been nobody else here. He has put them together, ready to be carried off to his nest."
"We'll save him that trouble," said Mr. Carleton. "Little rascal! he's a Didenhover in miniature."
"Oh no!" said Fleda; "he had as good a right to the nuts I am sure as we have, poor fellow.--Mr. Carleton--"
Mr. Carleton was throwing the nuts into the basket. At the anxious and undecided tone in which his name was pronounced he stopped and looked up, at a very wistful face.
"Mightn't we leave these nuts till we come back? If we find the trees over here full we sha'n't want them; and if we don't, these would be only a handful--"
"And the squirrel would be disappointed?" said Mr. Carleton smiling. "You would rather we should leave them to him?"
Fleda said yes, with a relieved face, and Mr. Carleton still smiling emptied his basket of the few nuts he had put in, and they walked on.