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Rh “Yes, on the whole, very well.”

“Then let him take them round to the stables, and come back here for his supper. He may have it in the kitchen to-night; only recollect, you convict, that if you misbehave either there or anywhere else on Castle Sullivan, you’ll smart for it pretty quick and pretty heavy. Recollect that. You’re here as a convicted felon, not a free man, and I don’t care what you’ve done to get here; whatever it was, the punishment for it is scandalously light; but the punishment for anything you do amiss on my estate shall be all the heavier on that account. So now you know. And don’t you say you hadn’t a fair warning at the start.”

With this Dr. Sullivan shook his cane in the new groom’s face, and called his overseer, for whom he had directions to which Tom did not listen; he was more interested in a lighted door on the right, where stood a female on the threshold of what he conceived to be the kitchen, and whither Mr. Nat himself had thrown furtive glances. But now father and son went indoors arm-in-arm; the overseer came up, a gruff man with flaming whiskers; and Tom caught him also looking wistfully towards the lighted door, before he was bidden to “come this way.”

So he followed the fiery whiskers to the stables, a long log building some little distance beyond the house; and here Tom was so smart in unsaddling, and so quick to find chaff-bin and oat-sack and saddle-room, that his surly companion was moved to rude advances.

“You’re pretty handy,” he growled. “Been a groom before?”

“Only since we left Sydney.”