The schoolroom served also as a playroom. Its furniture was scanty, including no easy-chairs. Mrs. Baron was a mother unusually given to the expression of tender feeling, in a sterner age than ours. But she never dreamt of giving her children opportunities for lounging. They had to grow up straight-backed, whatever it might cost them.
In this room Roy and Molly had done all their lessons together, till Roy reached the age of nine years; and the day on which he began to attend a large boys' school had witnessed the first deep desolation of little Molly's heart. An ever-present dread was upon her of the coming time—she knew it must come—when he would be sent away to a boarding-school, and she would be left alone.
Roy seated himself astride on a chair, with his face to the back, and poured out his tale. Molly listened in dead silence, staring hard at the opposite wall. If Roy did not mind about leaving her, she was not going to show how much she cared about losing him.
"And I shall write and tell you all I see in France," were his concluding words. "And you'll have Jack and Polly, you know—and Bob Monke too."
Would Roy have thought Jack and Polly and Bob enough if he had been the one to stay at home? That was the question in Molly's heart. But she only said, with a catch of her breath—
"I shouldn't like to be you, to have listened on the sly. It was mean."
The word stung sharply. Roy always pictured his own future in connection with a scarlet coat, a three-cornered cocked hat, a beautiful pigtail, and the stiffest of military stocks to hold up his chin. He knew something of a soldier's sense of honour, and even now, small though he was, he counted himself quite equal to fighting his country's battles. And that he—Roy Baron, son of a Colonel in His Majesty's Guards—should be accused by a girl of "meanness!"
"It was horridly mean," repeated Molly. "Prying on the sly, and then coming and telling me. If I had done such a thing, you'd have been the first to say it was wrong."
Roy stood upright.
"You needn't have told it me like that," he said reproachfully. "But I wouldn't be mean for anything, and I'm going to tell papa."