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Mistress Mary worked in her garden until it was time to go to her midday dinner. In fact, she was rather late in remembering, and when she put on her coat and hat, and picked up her skipping-rope, she could not believe that she had been working two or three hours.
That's three times." "My word! There's Mrs. Medlock's bell," said Martha, and she almost ran out of the room. "It's the strangest house any one ever lived in," said Mary drowsily, as she dropped her head on the cushioned seat of the armchair near her. Fresh air, and digging, and skipping-rope had made her feel so comfortably tired that she fell asleep.
Mistress Mary felt a little awkward as she went out of the room. Yorkshire people seemed strange, and Martha was always rather a puzzle to her. At first she had disliked her very much, but now she did not. The skipping-rope was a wonderful thing. She counted and skipped, and skipped and counted, until her cheeks were quite red, and she was more interested than she had ever been since she was born.
She still held in her hands, all unconsciously, the two ends of her skipping-rope, and she raised and lowered them regularly while making her enumeration. Then all at once she became conscious of what she was doing, blushed, stammered, and became so confused that I had to renounce my desire to know the full programme of study adopted in the Prefere Institution.
The lion, with the bashful air of a boy who gets up to "speak his piece" at a school examination, lingered in the middle of the stage. A rope was brought. The Swede took one end of it, the attendant who had brought it took the other, and between them they began to swing it, very slowly, as a great skipping-rope.
"Just look at this," proceeded Jimmy, grasping a handful of superfluous tissue around the boy's ribs. "All that ought to come off. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll buy a pair of flannel trousers and a sweater and some sneakers, and I'll take him for a run up Riverside Drive this evening. Do him no end of good. And a good skipping-rope, too. Nothing like it.
It was a strong, slender rope with a striped red and blue handle at each end, but Mary Lennox had never seen a skipping-rope before. She gazed at it with a mystified expression. "What is it for?" she asked curiously. "For!" cried out Martha. "Does tha' mean that they've not got skippin'-ropes in India, for all they've got elephants and tigers and camels! No wonder most of 'em's black.
To talk about Dickon meant to talk about the moor and about the cottage and the fourteen people who lived in it on sixteen shillings a week and the children who got fat on the moor grass like the wild ponies. And about Dickon's mother and the skipping-rope and the moor with the sun on it and about pale green points sticking up out of the black sod.
"Or a more thoroughly worked pack," added the captain, in a condoling manner. "Well, we are not all perfect, and I hope Mrs. Abbott will cheer up and look at this matter in a gayer point of view. For myself I hold that a skipping-rope is worse than the Jack of spades, Sundays or week days. Commodore, we shall see no pickerel to-day, unless we tear ourselves from this good company."
She was a rather tall, awkward girl, who grew out of her frocks, and tumbled her hair, and scandalised her elder sisters, in their pretty prim young ladyhood, by playing with the boys and clinging obstinately, in spite of her fifteen years, to her hoop and skipping-rope.
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