‘Oh, don’t, Gill! Aunt Jane and Miss Leverett were—not so angry—when I said—I was sorry.’
‘But what will papa and mamma say?’
‘Must they—must they hear?’
‘You would not think of deceiving them, I hope.’
‘Not deceiving, only not telling.’
‘That comes to much the same.’
‘You can’t say anything, Gill, for you are always down at Kal’s office, and nobody knows.’
This gave Gillian a great shock, but she rallied, and said with dignity, ‘Do you think I do not write to mamma everything I do?’
It sufficed for the immediate purpose of annihilating Valetta, who had just been begging off from letting mamma hear of her proceedings; but it left Gillian very uneasy as to how much the child might know or tell, and this made her proceed less violently, and more persuasively, ‘Whatever I do, I write to mamma; and besides, it is different with a little thing like you, and your school work. Come, tell me how you got into this scrape.’
‘Oh, Gill, it was so hard! All about those tiresome Gauls, and there were bits when the nominative case would go and hide itself, and those nasty tenses one doesn’t know how to look out, and I knew I was making nonsense, and you were out of the way, and there was nobody to help; and I knew mamma’s own book was there—the very part too—because Aunt Jane had shown it to us, so I did not think there was any harm in letting her help me out of the muddle.’