While this was going on within me, I never could bear that the
child should see me looking at him, and yet I was under a
fascination which made it a kind of business with me to contemplate
his slight and fragile figure and think how easily it might be
done. Sometimes I would steal up-stairs and watch him as he slept;
but usually I hovered in the garden near the window of the room in
which he learnt his little tasks; and there, as he sat upon a low
seat beside my wife, I would peer at him for hours together from
behind a tree; starting, like the guilty wretch I was, at every
rustling of a leaf, and still gliding back to look and start again.
Hard by our cottage, but quite out of sight, and (if there were any
wind astir) of hearing too, was a deep sheet of water. I spent
days in shaping with my pocket-knife a rough model of a boat, which
I finished at last and dropped in the child's way. Then I withdrew
to a secret place, which he must pass if he stole away alone to
swim this bauble, and lurked there for his coming. He came neither
that day nor the next, though I waited from noon till nightfall.
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