‘Since she has been in MY class,’ Claude repeated.
‘Well,’ said Lily, with a slight blush, ‘it is just what Robert says. He told her, when he gave her her prize Bible on Palm Sunday, that she had been going on very well, but she must take great care when removed from those whose influence now guided her, and who could he have meant but me? And now she is to go on with me always. She will be quite one of the old sort of faithful servants, who feel that they owe everything to their masters, and will it not be pleasant to have so sweet and expressive a face about the house?’
‘Do I know her face?’ said Claude. ‘Oh yes! I do. She has black eyes, I think, and would be pretty if she did not look pert.’
‘You provoking Claude!’ cried Lily, ‘you are as bad as Alethea, who never will say that Esther is the best person for us.’
‘I was going to inquire for the all-for-love principle,’ said Claude, ‘but I see it is in full force. And how are the verses, Lily? Have you made a poem upon Michael Moone, or Mohun, the actor, our uncle, whom I discovered for you in Pepys’s Memoirs?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Lily; ‘but I have been writing something about Sir Maurice, which you shall hear whenever you are not in this horrid temper.’
The next afternoon, as soon as luncheon was over, Lily drew Claude out to his favourite place under the plane-tree, where she proceeded to inflict her poem upon his patient ears, while he lay flat upon the grass looking up to the sky; Emily and Jane had promised to join them there in process of time, and the four younger ones were, as usual, diverting themselves among the farm buildings at the Old Court.
Lily began: ‘I meant to have two parts about Sir Maurice going out to fight when he was very young, and then about his brothers being killed, and King Charles knighting him, and his betrothed, Phyllis Crossthwayte, embroidering his black engrailed cross on his banner, and then the taking the castle, and his being wounded, and escaping, and Phyllis not thinking it right to leave her father; but I have not finished that, so now you must hear about his return home.’
‘A romaunt in six cantos, entitled Woe woe,
By Miss Fanny F. known more commonly so,’
muttered Claude to himself; but as Lily did not understand or know whence his quotation came, it did not hurt her feelings, and she went merrily on:—