“You!”
“Yes. You know he wouldn’t work at anything, and I used to make him come and say his lessons to me—the kings of England, you know, and the rivers, and populations, and French verbs. Well, then, if he didn’t know them, I made him learn them till he did. But of course he didn’t wish any one to know, so we had to get up early, and sit in the hay-loft, or down by the bridge. I could not help the boys knowing that Dick and I went out together, and at last Jack found us in Clements’ hay-loft. Dick ran away, but Jack was very angry with me, and insulted me; and Cherry—he went and told papa, and they sent me to London. But I never told the reason, because I had promised Dick. Now, Cherry, wouldn’t it have been very wrong to give up the chance of doing Dick good because Jack chose to be ridiculous? It just made him succeed, and perhaps he will owe it to me that he is a respectable person, and earns his living. You would have helped him, wouldn’t you?”
“Why, yes,” said Cherry; “but that is not quite the same thing.”
“Because I am a girl. Cherry, I think it would be mean to have let that stop me. But now he is through, I shall never do it again, of course; and, Cherry, indeed I meant it just as if he had been a ploughboy.” Here Nettie hung her tall head, and her tone grew less defiant.
“But, after all, Nettie, you should not have done what you knew granny and father would not like,” said Cherry, much puzzled what to say to her.
“It was because papa never knew that I told you,” said Nettie rapidly.
Cheriton asked a few more questions, and elicited that Nettie had, very early in their intimacy, taken upon herself the reform of Dick, and had domineered over him with all the force of a strong will over a weak one. Nettie had acted in perfect good faith, and had defied her brother’s attack on her; but as the lessons went on, her instinct had taught her that Dick found her attractive, and came to learn to please himself, not her. The girl had all the self-confidence of her race, and having set her mind on what she called “doing good” to Dick, she defied her own consciousness of his motives, having begun in kindness dashed with considerable contempt. But lazy Dick had powers of his own, and by the time of her quarrel with Jack, Nettie had felt herself on dangerous ground. “I shan’t marry—no one is like our boys,” she said to herself; but there was just a little traitorous softening and an indefinite sense of wrong-doing which had made her seek absolution from Cheriton, and with the peculiar absence of folly, which was a marked characteristic of the slow-thinking twins, she gave herself the protection of his knowledge.
Cheriton’s impulse was to take up Jack’s line and give her a good scolding, but he was touched by her appeal, and had learned to weigh his words carefully. He said something rather lame and inadequate about being more particular in future, but he gave Nettie’s hand a kind little squeeze, and she felt herself off her own mind. It had been a curious incident, and had done much to make Nettie into a woman—too much of a woman to look on her protégé with favouring eyes. Dick, too, was likely to find other interests, but Nettie had helped to give him a fair start, and her scorn of his old faults could never be quite forgotten.