Lord de la Poer and Lady Barbara spread the table with papers; Lady Jane sat by; the children were behind the heavy red curtains that parted off the second room. There was a great silence at first, then began a little tittering, then a little chattering, then presently a stifled explosion. Lady Barbara began to betray some restlessness; she really must see what that child was about.
“No, no,” said Lord de la Poer; “leave them in peace. That poor girl will never thrive unless you let her use her voice and limbs. I shall make her come over and enjoy herself with my flock when we come up en masse.”
The explosions were less carefully stifled, and there were some sounds of rushing about, some small shrieks, and then the door shut, and there was a silence again.
By this it may be perceived that Kate and Ernest had become tolerably intimate friends. They had informed each other of what games were their favourites; Kate had told him the Wardour names and ages; and required from him in return those of his brothers and sisters. She had been greatly delighted by learning that Adelaide was no end of a hand at climbing trees; and that whenever she should come and stay at their house, Ernest would teach her to ride. And then they began to consider what play was possible under the present circumstances—beginning they hardly knew how, by dodging one another round and round the table, making snatches at one another, gradually assuming the characters of hunter and Red Indian. Only when the hunter had snatched up Aunt Jane’s tortoise-shell paper-cutter to stab with, complaining direfully that it was a stupid place, with nothing for a gun, and the Red Indian’s crinoline had knocked down two chairs, she recollected the consequences in time to strangle her own war-whoop, and suggested that they should be safer on the stairs; to which Ernest readily responded, adding that there was a great gallery at home all full of pillars and statues, the jolliest place in the world for making a row.
“Oh dear! oh dear! how I hope I shall go there!” cried Kate, swinging between the rails of the landing-place. “I do want of all things to see a statue.”
“A statue! why, don’t you see lots every day?”
“Oh! I don’t mean great equestrian things like the Trafalgar Square ones, or the Duke—or anything big and horrid, like Achilles in the Park, holding up a shield like a green umbrella. I want to see the work of the great sculptor Julio Romano.”
“He wasn’t a sculptor.”
“Yes, he was; didn’t he sculp—no, what is the word—Hermione. No; I mean they pretended he had done her.”
“Hermione! What, have you seen the ‘Winter’s Tale?’”