‘I will when I get it,’ says Betty, with tremendous sarcasm.
‘The reason you won’t wear it,’ says Carew, alluding to Susan’s despised brooch, ‘is plain to even the poor innocents around you. Girls, in spite of all Betty has said, seldom wear their keepsakes. They get cotton wool and wrap them up in it, and peep at them rapturously on Christmas Day or Easter Sunday, or on the beloved one’s birthday, or some other sacred occasion. What’s James’s birthday, Susan?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Susan; ‘and I don’t know, either, why you tease me so much about him. He is quite as little to me as I am to him.’ Her voice is trembling now. They have gone a little too far perhaps, or is the memory of James ‘stewing in the Soudan’ too much for her? Whichever it is, Mr. Crosby is growing anxious for her; but all the youngsters are now in full cry, and the proverbial cruelty of brothers and sisters is well known to many a long-suffering girl and boy.
‘Oh, Susan,’ says Betty, ‘where does one go to when one tells naughty-naughties? Dom; do you remember the evening just before James went abroad, when he went into floods of tears because she wouldn’t give him a rosebud she had in her dress? It took Dom, and me, and Carew, and a pint of water to restore him.’
At this they all laugh, even Susan, though very faintly and very shamefacedly. Her pretty eyes are shy and angry.
‘He wanted a specimen to take out with him to astonish the natives,’ says Carew. ‘You were the real specimen he wanted to take out with him, Susan, but as that was impracticable just then (it will probably be arranged next time), he decided on taking the rosebud instead.’
‘He wanted nothing,’ says Susan, whose face is now bent over Bonnie’s as if to hide it. ‘He didn’t care a bit about me.’
‘Indeed he did, Susan.’
A fresh element has fallen into the situation. Everyone looks round. The voice is the voice of Jacky—Jacky, who, up to this, has been as usual buried in a book. This time the burial has been deeper than ever, as the day before yesterday someone had lent him Mr. Stevenson’s enthralling ‘Treasure Island,’ from which no one can ever extract themselves until the very last page is turned. Jacky, since he first began it, has been practically useless, but just now a few fragments of the conversation going on around him have filtered to his brain.
Now, in his own peculiarly disagreeable way he adores Susan, and something has led him to believe that those around her are now depreciating her powers of attraction, and that she is giving in to them for want of support. Well, he will support her. Poor old Jacky! he comes nobly forward to her rescue, and as usual puts his foot in it.