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I only hope he won't take a fresh fancy into his head and change his mind again." "Perhaps he found he would make himself unpopular if he did not do it," suggested his mother. Marion held her tongue, and snipped away at her unbleached calico. "And then, again, about old Hoggs' cottage," pursued Mr. Daintree. "What on earth could make him forget where it was?
"Pat," I said, "though a young devil, is cheerful, and I never saw him anything but self-confident I can't imagine a girl such as you described bearing the faintest resemblance to that boy. You said that she was a kind of die-away, pathetic, appealing angel. Now Pat " "I know," said Daintree. "All the same, the likeness was there.
The "wretched boy" was Jimmy Griffiths afore-mentioned; he was the youth who was in the habit of blowing the organ. The schoolmaster, who was also the organist, was ill, and had sent word to Mr. Daintree that he would be unable to be at the church on the morrow. Eustace had asked Vera to take his place.
"Anyhow," said Daintree, "what he told her he told it to me afterwards, so there's no secret about it was this: He got hit in the leg during an advance through one of those woods north of the Somme, Mametz, I think. It was a beastly place. Our fellows had been in there two days before and had to clear out again. Then Simcox's lot went in you know the sort of thing it was?" I nodded.
There was no one to see them the gardeners had all gone home and no one was moving from the house. Only one small boy, with a rough head and a red face, stood below the stone balustrade, half-hidden among the hollyhocks and the roses, looking wistfully up at the windows of the house. "What am I to do with it?" said Tommy Daintree, half-aloud to himself, and looked sorely perplexed and bewildered.
'Now, he said, as Tony returned with Swift and Daintree, the two remaining House-prefects, 'you all know, of course, that Thomson is not in the House. The Headmaster wants you to go and look for him. Welch seems to have been the last to see him, and he left him lying in a ploughed field near Parker's Spinney. You all know Parker's Spinney, I suppose? 'Yes, sir.
Daintree began to think that everybody was going mad this morning. "My dear Marion, what on earth is the matter?" "Oh, you dear, stupid, blunder-headed old donkey!" exclaimed his wife, finishing her pas seul in front of him, and hugging him vehemently as a finale to the entertainment. "Do you mean to say that you don't see it?" "See it?
"No, no, no!" imperatively from Tommy, who was listening with rapidly crimsoning cheeks; "you shall not go and stop at Tripton, and tell Mr. Gisburne you will marry him!" Vera laughed. "No, Tommy, I don't think I will; not, that is to say, if you are a good boy. I think I can do something better than that with myself!" she added, softly, as if to herself. Mrs. Daintree caught the words.
"If I could die, I should be at peace," she had said. And she was only twenty-three! Eustace Daintree never forgot it. Ill blows the wind that profits nobody. Shakespeare, "Henry IV."
"What can possess her to bark at the peacocks?" said Helen. "Be quiet, Topsy." But Topsy refused to be tranquillized. "She is barking at something below the terrace; perhaps there is a cat there," said Denis. "If so, it would be Dutch courage, indeed," answered Helen, laughing. They went to the edge of the stone parapet and looked over; there stood Tommy Daintree below them, among the hollyhocks.
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