'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Is he hurt?'

'No,' replied Harry sulkily. 'No thanks to that brute of yours, though.'

'Oh!' This very reproachfully.

Harry looked up and encountered her eyes again, and they shattered him,
as they had done in chapel, giving him a sense of having exerted his
strength to hurt something sweet and tender as a flower; and yet the girl
seemed to tower above him. Nature, in putting the fresh sympathetic soul
of a child into the grand body of a Minerva, had set a problem that was
too deep for Harry Hardy.

'Beg pardon,' he said, humbly; ''twas my dog started it. Down, Cop! To
heel--!'

He checked himself suddenly on a 'stock term.' There were tones of his
master's that Cop never dared to disobey; he went down at full length and
lay panting, regarding Maori fixedly with a sidelong and malevolent eye.
Harry returned to his cradle, and Chris approached the stepping-stones
and paused there.

'Did Dickie Haddon give you my message?' she asked in a low voice.

Harry nodded.

'It's all right,' he said.

There was another pause, broken at length by Chris.