“What does Daisy want?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, she heard you singing, and demanded that you should come up and sing to her, otherwise she was going to sit up in bed until morning!”
“That doesn’t sound a very good plan,” he observed.
“It’s a remarkably bad one, but her own. Daisy has great strength of character, and I’m sure I don’t know where she gets it from. Good night! Put the lights out, won’t you, when you come upstairs?”
It was a very hot night, and Hugh stood at the window for a minute or two, thinking over the evening. He felt somehow rather stirred and excited by his two-minute talk with Mrs. Allbutt, for it had literally not occurred to him at all to think of his decision as affecting anybody but himself, and the idea that he and his actions could affect other people meant an attitude of mind, egoistic, that was quite alien to him. Then close on the heels of that came the thought that upstairs, sitting up in bed, with firm determination on her features, was Daisy, waiting till he came to sing to her. That honestly seemed to matter much more than any operatic career, and he put out the lights, as he had been desired to do, and went upstairs.
The night nursery, as he knew, was just beyond his own room, which was opposite Mrs. Allbutt’s. She had turned into her sister’s bedroom on her way to her own to get a book, and so it happened that Hugh passed on to his room while she was still there. Just beyond was the door of the nursery, wide open, like its windows, for Lady Rye was of the open-window school, and Hugh, with a backward glance as if he were rather guilty, went into it. A night-light was burning, and dimly he saw a little night-shirted figure sitting straight as a grenadier up in bed, in performance of her vow. She hailed him with a little coo of delight.
“Oh, Hughie, have you come to sing?” she said. “How long you have been! And I am so sleepy!”
“Sitonim, you little brute,” said Hugh, “you really are too naughty! Why can’t you go to sleep properly like Chopimalive?”
“If you have come to scold me, like mummy,” announced Daisy, with dignity, “you needn’t have come at all I thought”—and her voice quivered a little with tired fretfulness—“I thought you had come to sing to me. I shall sit up just like this until you do, because I said so. And I am so sleepy!”
Mrs. Allbutt had found the book she wanted and was going to her room close by, when she heard the pipe of the childish treble. At that, though she was an honourable woman, she deliberately stopped and listened.