Nor did our lady visitors’ ways reassure him, though they meant to be kind. They could not help being formal and stiff, not as they were with Griff and me. The two gentlemen were thoroughly friendly and hearty; Parson Frank could hardly have helped being so towards any one in the same house with himself; and as to little Anne, she found in the new-comer a carpenter and upholsterer superior even to Martyn; but her candour revealed a great deal which I overheard one afternoon, when the two children were sitting together on the hearth-rug in the bookroom in the twilight.
‘I want to see Mr. Clarence’s white feather,’ observed Anne.
‘Griff has a white plume in his Yeomanry helmet,’ replied Martyn; ‘Clarence hasn’t one.’
‘Oh, I saw Mr. Griffith’s!’ she answered; ‘but Cousin Horace said Mr. Clarence showed the white feather.’
‘Cousin Horace is an ape!’ cried Martyn.
‘I don’t think he is so nice as an ape,’ said Anne. ‘He is more like a monkey. He tries the dolls by court-martial, and he shot Arabella with a pea-shooter, and broke her eye; only grandpapa made him have it put in again with his own money, and then he said I was a little sneak, and if I ever did it again he would shoot me.’
‘Mind you don’t tell Clarence what he said,’ said Martyn.
‘Oh, no! I think Mr. Clarence very nice indeed; but Horace did tease so about that day when he carried poor Amos Bell home. He said Ellen had gone and made friends with the worst of all the wicked Winslows, who had shown the white feather and disgraced his flag. No; I know you are not wicked. And Mr. Griff came all glittering, like Richard Cœur de Lion, and saved us all that night. But Ellen cried to think what she had done, and mamma said it showed what it was to speak to a strange young man; and she has never let Ellen and me go out of the grounds by ourselves since that day.’
‘It is a horrid shame,’ exclaimed Martyn, ‘that a fellow can’t get into a scrape without its being for ever cast up to him.’
‘I like him,’ said Anne. ‘He gave Mary Bell a nice pair of boots, and he made a new pair of legs for poor old Arabella, and she can really sit down! Oh, he is very nice; but’—in an awful whisper—‘does he tell stories? I mean fibs—falsehoods.’