‘Would you not warn him, then?’ says Betty reproachfully, returning, however, to her ordinary appearance, and making an aside at Bonnie, a pretence at shooting him with her first finger and thumb, that sends the delicate little creature into fits of laughter. ‘Poor old Jacky!’ returning to the charge. ‘It isn’t for nothing that ghosts reveal themselves. It is easy to see that this one has her eye on you!’
‘She hasn’t,’ says Jacky again, who is on the point of tears. He is evidently not partial to ghosts. ‘And it wasn’t through a glass wall I saw her—it was——’ He stops dead short.
‘Yes?’ says Susan, still severely. ‘Do be quiet, Betty, and let him speak. It was——’
‘Through the hole in the wall near the garden,’ confesses Jacky doggedly, but somewhat shamefacedly.
‘You see, it was through the wall, after all!’ says Betty, breaking into a delighted laugh. ‘She’ll get you, Jacky—she’ll get you yet.’
‘I don’t think it is a very nice thing to peep through other people’s walls into their grounds,’ says Susan, more from the point of view that she is the eldest sister, and bound to say a word in season now and then, than from any feeling of horror at the act. All boys peep through holes in walls, when lucky enough to find them. ‘How would you like it,’ says she, ‘if you were found doing it?’
‘But I wasn’t found,’ retorts Jacky sulkily.
‘Susan,’ Betty breaks into the argument with a vivacity all her own, ‘you have no more morality than a cat. You are teaching him all wrong. It isn’t the not being found out, Jacky, that is of importance, as Susan is most erroneously bent on impressing upon you; it is the fact of peeping in itself that makes you the’—shaking her finger at him—‘miserable sinner that you are!’
‘Sinner yourself!’ says Jacky, now driven to desperation and the most unreserved impertinence. ‘I often saw you look through the hole in the wall yourself.’
At this, instead of being annoyed, both Susan and Betty give way to inextinguishable mirth; whereupon Jacky, who had, perhaps, hoped that his shot would take effect, prepares once more to march away. But Betty, making a sudden grab at him, catches him by his trousers.