“Why didn’t you go and serve Mass, you scamps?” went on Wagram.
“Oh, we do that enough at Hillside, pater,” answered Gerard, hanging on to his father’s arm in a sort of insinuating and conciliatory way; “besides, we got in—er—a little late.”
Delia, listening, remembered Wagram’s remark when they had come upon the speaker’s acolyte dress in the sacristy the day that she had first tried her hand at the organ. He was an exact replica of his father, she decided—just what Wagram might have been at his age.
“Reggie’s just as bad, Mr Wagram,” struck in Yvonne, who deemed it her mission to “round up” her brother in matters of the kind. “He slipped away from me when we were talking to old Mrs Clancy, and I believe he was at the bottom of it.”
“Oh, well, as it’s the beginning of the holidays, I suppose they must be allowed some law,” rejoined Wagram.
“Give me your key, Miss Calmour, and I’ll unlock your bike and wheel it up to the house,” said Gerard.
“That will be good of you,” answered Delia, with a smile that won the boy’s heart there and then. She was mentally contrasting him with the raw, uncleanly, unlicked cub, which mainly constituted her experience of the animal hight ‘boy’ of the same age. Yet about this one on the other hand there was nothing priggish, nothing self-conscious. He was purely and entirely natural.
During lunch the old Squire congratulated her on her playing, and also on the excellence of her illustrated article in The Old Country Side, which had appeared that week.
“We were wondering how in the world you managed to say so much in so limited a space,” he observed, “and to say just the right thing, too. What a memory you must have, child!”
Delia was thinking that, whatever else might slip her memory, no single detail about Hilversea Court was likely to do so.