"Murder-ess," howls the chorus, recklessly delighted.
"Good boys! Now be careful! Prosecutor? Take time over it. Masculine, Prosecut-or. Feminine?"
"Prosecutr-ess!" thunders the chorus, plunging to destruction on the swing of the thing; and "Oh, you stu-pids! you stu-pids!" cries Miss Purdie. "You intol-er-able stu-pids!" and the unhappy chorus hangs its head and cowers beneath the little storm it has let loose.
Delightfully appreciative, though, Miss Purdie, when the "break" of ten minutes comes and when the boys gorge plum-cake and milk and make her positively quiver with recitals of the terrible gallops on the pony; and delightfully concerned, too, when, as happens once or twice, Rollo is discovered to have a headache and is made to lie on the sofa in a rug and with a hot-water bottle, while the lessons are continued with Percival in fierce whispers and hissed "stu-pids." Delightfully inconsequent, moreover, Miss Purdie, who at the end of an especially exasperating morning, when Hunt is heard with the pony outside the gate, will suddenly cry: "Well, go away then, you thorough little stu-pids; go away!" and will drive them to the door and then at once will go into ecstatics over the pony and hurry Percival in for sugar, and quake with terror while the pony nibbles it from her hand, and stand and wave at her gate while they go flying down the road, one in the saddle, the other gasping behind.
Delightfully appreciative, Miss Purdie, and they learn to love her for all their terrible fear of her.
Percival, Miss Purdie finds, is the more affectionate—also the more troublesome. Rollo takes his cue from Percival and acts accordingly. "You are the ringleader!" cries Miss Purdie, stabbing a forefinger at Percival on the fearful morrow of the day on which truant was played—whose morning had seen Miss Purdie running between her house and her gate like a distressed hen abandoned by her chickens; whose afternoon had seen the alarm communicated to Burdon Old Manor and to "Post Offic"; and whose evening had discovered the disconsolate return to the village of two travel-stained and weary figures. "You are the ringleader in everything, and I don't know whether you ought to be more ashamed or you"—and she turns from the ringleader to stab her finger at the ring, as represented by Rollo—"or you, for allowing yourself to be led away by one so much younger."
"I've told you," protests Percival, "I've told you again and again we got lost; so I should like to know what you think of that?"
"Don't use that abom-inable phrase, sir! If you hadn't gone off—tempted Rollo to go off—you wouldn't have got lost, would you?"
Percival beams at her in his disarming manner. "Well, you see, we saw a fox and went after it and kept on seeing it and then found we were lost; so I should like—"
"Don't argue. I tell you, you are the ring-leader!"