Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/184

 freedom, looked cautiously about him, and then said with great determination:

"I 'm going to hook away from here! I 'm all hot and sticky and itchy, and I 'm going to have a swim!"

The other boy half-heartedly warned him back, yet, even while telling him that it was a pretty bad thing to be sick, enlarging vividly and enthusiastically on the beautiful warmth of the water of late, and the new spring-board the gang had put up over the diving-hole.

The natural outcome of their talk was that Lonely meekly obeyed Lionel Clarence's reckless and imperious order to put the ladder up to the window, and while this was being done he himself was poking a pair of wobbly legs into his Sunday velvet trousers.

Then he rolled up the bed-rug, and, along with one of the pillows, thrust it artfully down between the sheets, so that when covered at the top with a handkerchief and ice-bag, it would take a second glance to discover that the muffled bundle was not really a sleeping patient.

This done, he crept carefully down the