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"How many books did you and Bert gather up this morning, Dot?" "Fifty-three volumes besides Miss Ainsworth's. Those were already over here in the shed. Where is Archie?" "He and Winifred are coming. They were going to bring a rug Win's mother said we could have, and two lamps." "They will enjoy carrying them over this hot afternoon!" said Bess, deftly hemming a curtain.
Lord James replaced the club, and waved his hand around at the camp. "'Pon my word, Tom," he commented, "you've out-Crusoed old Robinson!" "Sure!" agreed Blake. "He had a whole shipful of stuff as a starter, while we didn't have anything except my magnifying glass and Win's penknife and keys." He pulled out a curious sheath-knife made of a narrow ribbon of steel set in a bone back.
Early roses were now plentiful and as Win sauntered through their fragrant mazes, he realized how much loving thought had been expended through the centuries on this old garden. Sad indeed that the present owner of Laurel Manor was the last Richard Lisle. Win's reverie was broken by the passing of Pierre, with a pleasant "Bon jour, M'sieur," and a touch of his cap.
The trim little maid replenished the fire, replaced a daffodil fallen from a vase, patted Tylo, gave him a biscuit and vanished as noiselessly as she came. Left alone, Win began to walk slowly up and down the library, wondering about the matters which were "to arrange themselves." The tools Pierre carried, the direction in which he was walking, to Win's alert mind suggested the Manor cave.
"So do I you," said Win, but did not tell her that she was a sardine. This might be a worse epithet in a foreign language even than Lady Ermyntrude. "I'm for the toy department. What are you?" rapped out the clear little voice that matched the clear little personality a personality which, at the top of its pompadour, did not reach the tip of Win's ear. "Mine is called a two-hour bargain sale "
"There's no such woman, except his mother, and she worships the ground he walks on. Thinks he's a kind of up-to-date Saint George, and I'm hanged if she's far wrong. Why, since Peter was a boy he's never cared that" and a yellow thumb and finger snapped for emphasis under Win's eyes "for any woman till he got silly over you." The girl laughed a fierce little laugh. "You tell me this?
"It's going somewhere. Look at the dinky cars with a kind of balcony and that speck of an engine." "That's a pony engine for sure," drawled Win, joining his sister at the window. Except that he was thin and fragile no one could have known from Win's clever, merry dark face, how greatly he was handicapped by a serious heart trouble.
Heads flew out of windows, for the thing was unbelievable, and among other heads was Win's. Instinct cried that the chortling was for her. The balcony where the rubber plants had died and mummied themselves, being scarcely more than a foot wide, she was able to see a face, crowned with red hair and white as a Pierrette's in the lights of the street, looking anxiously up from the cab window.
Fifteen minutes' loitering through narrow, ill-paved streets, crowded with hurrying people and a great number of dogs, brought the four to an open square of irregular shape with a gilded statue at one end. Its curious draperies caught Win's observant eye and he walked around it thoughtfully. "What a very queer costume!" he remarked as he completed his circuit.
How everything that was beautiful and tender and helpless in nature appealed to him we know from his poems. There is the field mouse the "wee sleekit,* cow'rin', tim'rous beastie," whose nest he turned up and destroyed in his November plowing. "Poor little mouse, I would not hurt you," he says *Smooth. "Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin; Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!"
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