XV
"WORN OUT IN A GOOD SERVICE"
Lessons and play were the daily routine now. The children kept out of scrapes wonderfully. Perhaps it was Miss Falkner's quick interference before real harm was done, or perhaps it was as she liked to hope, her pupils were getting more considerate of other people's feelings.
"It is their lively imagination, and their passion for acting out what they hear or read, that works such mischief," Miss Falkner said to Mona one day when they were talking over the children. "They are reckless of consequences. Future results are never taken into consideration."
She said this when she had just stopped Jack from lighting a fire in the loft.
He was a prisoner in hiding, he informed her, and he was going to cook himself a meal. Bumps had been foraging for him, and had brought him a raw piece of bacon.
"I was going to be most careful," he informed her. "Of course I wouldn't light the hay. I pushed it all away, and had got quite an empty corner!"
But one day the children's energies were turned in another direction. They were all devoted to Mr. Arnold, and as he lived alone with an old housekeeper who was really fond of children, they very often found their way over to the vicarage. Sometimes he invited them to tea with him, and it was when they returned one evening from this dissipation that they announced in the drawing-room—
"We are going to get Mr. Arnold a wife!"