‘No, but good governesses never are daily!’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Gillian, turning round on her. ‘Perhaps you don’t know that Miss Vincent has a First Class Cambridge Certificate in everything, and is daily, because she likes to live with her mother.’
‘I think,’ added Lady Merrifield, with a smile, ‘that Dolores has been in the way of seeing more clever people, and getting superior teaching of some kind, but we will do the best we can for her, and try not to let her miss many advantages.’
Dolores felt a little abashed, and decidedly angry at being put in the wrong.
The elders kindly turned away the general attention from her. There was a great deal of merry family fun going on, which was quite like a new language to her. Fergus and Primrose wanted to go out in search of blackberries. Gillian undertook to drive them in the cart, but as the donkey had once or twice refused to cross a little stream of water that traversed the road, the brothers foretold that she would ignominiously come back again.
‘Gill and water are perilous!’ observed Hal.
‘Jack’s not here,’ said Gillian; ‘besides, it is down, not up the hill, and I’m sure I don’t want to draw a pail of water.’
‘No—Sancho will do that.’
‘The gong will sound and sound, buzz and roar,’ said Wilfred. ‘No Gill! no little ones! We shall send out and find them stuck fast in the lane, Sancho with his feet spread out wide, Gill with three or four sticks lying broken on the road round her, the kids reduced to eating blackberries like the children in the wood.’
‘Don’t Fred,’ said Gillian. ‘You’ll frighten them.’