“I expect they were a couple of bad ones,” she said, “or they’d have been back before now. Well, people may say I take after Harry; but I’ll never run away, not if they tell any number of talcs of me.”
“Hush,” said Wyn, “here’s Grace Elton. Don’t you say nothing, Florence, to no one.”
“I ain’t given to blabbing,” said Florence coolly.
Grace Elton was a pleasant, well-dressed girl, though in a far quieter style than Florence. Wyn fell behind with a pair of boy Eltons, and the girls chatted until they reached the little whitewashed school—close by the church, with a great climbing rose hanging over its rustic doorway.
Ashcroft was a very small village, and the school was a mixed one. On Sunday two classes of boys, under charge of the clergyman, Mr Murray, and Miss Hardman, occupied one side of the room. The day-school mistress taught the younger girls at the other; and under the pretty latticed window on a square of forms sat the elder ones. They were a flaxen-haired, rosy-faced set of children, simple and rather stolid-looking, among whom Wyn Warren, Grace Elton, and others of the head servants’ children were decidedly the superiors. As Florence and Grace came up to their class, a girl in a straight white frock, with a red sash and a large straw hat, came and sat down on the teacher’s chair. “Miss Geraldine’ll take us,” whispered the girls, as they stood up and curtseyed; “Mrs Murray’s got a cold.”
The kind-faced, white-haired old clergyman read the prayer, and then the first class began to repeat fluently, but with an accent that Florence could hardly follow, a surprising number of lessons.
“Can you say your collect?” said Miss Geraldine to Florence.
“No, teacher. We don’t learn lessons at home—we’ve no time for it,” said Florence.
“You can learn it for next week,” said Miss Geraldine, with a calmness that astonished Florence as much as the other girls were amazed at hearing Miss Geraldine called “teacher.”
But there was something in the unconscious composure of this slip of a girl, who looked as if she had never been disobeyed in her life, and did not know what a struggle to keep order meant, that impressed Florence with a curious sense of fellow-feeling.