CHAPTER IV
A STORMY DAY
'Alack-a-day, what tears we mingle!
For trouble ne'er, I wot, came single.'
Though Gorswen was the most quiet little country spot you could find, it lay only four miles away from Warford, a rising inland watering-place, which boasted not only a Mayor and Corporation, but a pump-room and concert-hall, and had a large and fleeting population of visitors, and, to judge by its growing suburbs, an ever-increasing number of residents.
Lilian and Peggy attended the Warford High School, and Bobby the Grammar School. It was not quite what Father would have wished for them, for he had been a Rugby boy himself, but it was the best he could afford; and certainly the education was excellent, though the pupils were decidedly mixed. Still, as Aunt Helen said, 'You have no need to copy the manners of the children you meet. You have been taught at home to behave like gentlepeople, so please to remember you are Vaughans, and keep up the credit of the family.'
Every morning at eight o'clock the little governess-car and Pixie, the steady black pony, stood ready at the side gate, and the trio jogged off to school with their lesson-books and their luncheons in their satchels. David could not be spared to go with them, but all the children had been taught to drive, and even Bobby had a firm hand on the reins, and knew the rules of the road as well as many a more experienced coachman; and I think, too, that Pixie had a sense of her responsibilities, and could be trusted not to get the wheel locked with a passing waggon, or to race too furiously down a steep hill, whatever feats her drivers might urge her to perform. The pony and trap were put up for the day at a quiet little inn midway between the two schools, and were always waiting for the children by a quarter past four, when, like the traditional donkey, they joyfully turned their noses towards home again.
On one special Monday morning in May Peggy got out of bed in that peculiar frame of mind which Father charitably called 'highly strung,' and Nancy broadly defined as 'having black dog on your back.' To begin with, it was wet. Not that Peggy minded rain in the least, but if it were fine Mr. Vaughan had intended to go over to a great cattle fair which was to be held that day at Shrewsbury, and had promised to bring her home a guinea-pig. 'And now he won't go,' she thought dismally, 'and I shan't have the chance of another until Warford Agricultural Show in the autumn.'
Peggy hated Monday mornings. After the delightful freedom of Saturday and Sunday at home it was always doubly hard to return to school, and the time until next Friday afternoon seemed an endless prospect. All the nastiest lessons, Peggy thought, came on Mondays—grammar and arithmetic, dates and French verbs, and all those horrid fussy things which take a great deal of learning without being specially interesting in themselves.
On this particular morning the children were late for school, for Pixie had cast a shoe upon the road, and Lilian had been obliged to drive so slowly that the church clock was chiming a quarter past nine as Peggy opened her classroom door.
It is rather an ordeal to walk late into a schoolroom full of thirty girls, and the slightly nervous feeling had the unfortunate effect of making Peggy march in with a don't-care look on her face, and shut the door with a bang.