The girl had started forward to meet them, and lo! her mantle of rippling gold no longer draped her shoulders: it formed a shining crown instead.
“You needn’t stare like that, Gerard,” she began. “It’s beastly rude, you know. Never saw anyone with their hair up before?” this with dignity. “No; but, Mr Wagram, isn’t it detestable? Will have to do the grown-up now, I suppose.”
“We must all grow up one day, Sunbeam,” was the answer. “Even I am not exempt from the process; and as for Gerard here, why he’s gone through it long ago.”
“That you, Wagram?” And Haldane came forward with a newspaper in one hand and a half-smoked pipe in the other. “Come along and find a cool seat, and I should think something else cool would go down after your spin—something long and sparkling and with a musical tinkle of ice in it, for choice. Oh, the child,” following their glances. “Yes. She’s just been trying an experiment. I tell her she’s canonised now with this bright and shining halo round her head. Think it improves her?”
“I don’t know that it does,” struck in Gerard frankly. “Ah-ah! I see. She’s hoisted it all up so that Reggie and I can’t tweak it any more.”
“Quite likely,” retorted Yvonne. “If you did now it’d be a case of ‘great cry and little wool,’ as Henry the Eighth said when he got hold of the wrong pig by the ear.”
“When he did what?” said Wagram, mystified. “History does not spare the memory of that bloody-minded monarch, Sunbeam, but it is absolutely silent on the deed you have just named—at least so far as my reading of it goes.”
Gerard threw back his head and roared. Haldane was absolutely speechless.
“Well, what is it, then? What ought I to have said? Gerard, d’you hear? I don’t believe you know yourself.”
“Oh, Lord! I shall die in a moment. ‘As Henry the Eighth said’!” he gasped. “What you were feeling after is ‘as the devil said when he tried to shear the pig.’”