Lord de la Poer broke out into an uncontrollable laugh, half at the aunt, half at the niece. “Why, she has grown a moustache!” he exclaimed. “Girls, what have you been doing to her?” and walking up to them, he turned Kate round to a mirror, where she beheld her own brown eyes looking out of a face dashed over with black specks, thicker about the mouth, giving her altogether much the colouring of a very dark man closely shaved. It was so exceedingly comical, that she went off into fits of laughing, in which she was heartily joined by all the merry party.
“There,” said Lord de la Poer, “do you want to know what your Uncle Giles is like? you’ve only to look at yourself!—See, Barbara, is it not a capital likeness?”
“I never thought her like Giles,” said her aunt gravely, with an emphasis on the name, as if she meant that the child did bear a likeness that was really painful to her.
“My dears,” said the mother, “you should not have put her in such a condition; could you not have been more careful?”
Kate expected one of them to say, “She would do it in spite of us;” but instead of that Fanny only answered, “It is not so bad as it looks, Mamma; I believe her frock is quite safe; and we will soon have her face and hands clean.”
Whereupon Kate turned round and said, “It is all my fault, and nobody’s else’s. They told me not, but it was such fun!”
And therewith she obeyed a pull from Grace, and ran upstairs with the party to be washed; and as the door shut behind them, Lord de la Poer said, “You need not be afraid of that likeness, Barbara. Whatever else she may have brought from her parsonage, she has brought the spirit of truth.”
Though knowing that something awful hung over her head, Kate was all the more resolved to profit by her brief minutes of enjoyment; and the little maidens all went racing and flying along the passages together; Kate feeling as if the rapid motion among the other young feet was life once more.
“Well! your frock is all right; I hope your aunt will not be very angry with you,” said Adelaide. (She know Adelaide now, for Grace was the inky one.)
“It is not a thing to be angry for,” added Grace.