Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/21

natural elision. “Remember I won’t go—you’re meaning to be good, but—I just won’t.”

His English vocabulary was disconcertingly apt to stop short at times, leaving him with all the lesser shades of his meaning unexpressed, and he would not speak French to help it out. On this point he explained himself more fully the second day.

“I don’t want to be French—like him. I hate anything that’s like him. I’ll be English—my mother was English, did you know? I’ll call myself Antony St. Croix—Croy, like those Jersey people we met; and I’ll grow up and do things. What do you do?”

George? George just travelled about, and hunted, and had a good deal of shooting, and———

“Then you have money,” said Tony briefly. “I shan’t be able to do that. I must work.”

There was a short pause while he looked rather puzzled. Then:

“But I haven't seen many people work,” he said. “He never worked in his life. It’s hard to know what to do, but when I’m old it’ll be easier. A man can do anything.”

On the evening of the third day George had settled something for Tony, and it was that same evening that Tony left for the South. He did not say good-bye, for he was afraid of being kept and locked up, his vision of orphélinats being a lurid one; and he took with him eleven francs fifty and nothing beside. In any case his savage sense of independence, sprung out of disgusted revolt from Ste. Croix’ eternal sponging, would not have allowed him to stay with George much longer. He reflected bitterly that he could not pay back, but that was soon swamped in the happy conviction that when he was grown up he would retrace his steps through the world, showering gold on all who had befriended him and wreaking vague,