'Oh, she will be willing. A cottage in the country! Besides, it is the only reasonable possibility.'
'I should think it would satisfy her,' said Wilmet.
'And then—'
Everybody understood that 'And then.' It was Alda's pretension to be at the head of the family that was the chief obstacle to Wilmet's abdicating that post. Without her, Geraldine, stronger and less lame, might undertake the charge of the comparatively few permanently at home. Might indeed hardly expressed the amount of uncertainty as to her capability; and yet but for that 'And then,' Wilmet would hardly have yielded as she did the next day.
Stella had a blackberry fever. Possibly Wilmet's frugal regimen engendered a hankering for fruit, or it might have been the mere love of enterprise that rendered her eagerly desirous of an expedition to a lane where splendid blackberries were reported to grow. Since the day she had been lost, she had never been allowed to go out with Bernard; but in Lance she had acquired a much more complaisant play-fellow, who not only promised his escort to the lane, but the purchase of the sugar, and aid in the concoction of the jam; but he durst not venture till late in the day, and thereupon John Harewood suggested, 'Would not your sister be at liberty by that time?'
'Lance can take care of me,' said Stella; but in her eyes the whole romance of the expedition was destroyed by his acquiescence. 'We'll catch her as she comes out, and make her go with us.'
'Among all the girls?' laughed Cherry; and Captain Harewood coloured, shook his head, and shuddered.
'The girls won't hurt me,' said Lance, 'not if there were twenty hundred. I'll bring her from the very teeth of them. Jack may wait round the corner if he likes.'
The party waited, till their patience was worn to a thread, for the opening of the tall olive door, until Lance valiantly resolved on a single-handed assault, and had just mounted the steps, when it suddenly opened, and he found himself obstructing the path of a swarm of little girls and big, who all stared, most giggled, and some greeted him. To the least of these he confided that he wanted his sister, when she innocently piloted him to the school-room, where Wilmet, with her hat on, was keeping guard over three victims detained by unfinished tasks. Every one gazed at him as if he had been a sort of Actæon; but nothing daunted, he answered his sister's anxious exclamation. 'Nothing is the matter; but we are going for a walk, and want you.—Miss Maria,' he cried, as the sound of the unfeminine step and voice brought in one of the heads, 'please do let off these impositions, we do so want her!'
'What, you here! This is an invasion!' she added good-humouredly. 'Am I to take it as a convalescent's privilege?'