“Rosamund and Frances,” she said, in a tone of elaborate reasonableness, “I want you to listen to me, like good children. Lady Argent is very kindly letting you stay here so that we shouldn’t have to go back to the cottage, which is all upside down with packing and—and furniture and things, and I want you to be very good and give no trouble at all.”
“Oh no,” breathed Lady Argent, distressed. “But would they rather—do they want to go to the cottage again——” She hesitated helplessly.
“Bless me,” cried Bertie cheerily, “the cottage isn’t going to run away in the night. There’ll be heaps of time to-morrow morning before we start for home.”
Rosamund flushed an angry red.
“The cottage is our home,” she said with emphasis.
“Well, darling, that’s very loyal of you,” laughed her guardian, “and I’m quite ready to hear you call it so until you’ve got used to our part of the world.
“Now what about washing paws, Sybil, before we adorn your dinner-table?”
It was perhaps this masterly conduct of a difficult situation that made Lady Argent say to her son that evening, when Mrs. Tregaskis had hurried upstairs “just to give those two a tucking-up and ‘God bless you’”:
“Oh Ludovic! How splendid Bertie is, and how I hope it will turn out well.”
“Why should it not?” asked Ludovic, who held, indeed, his own certainties as to why it should not, but was perversely desirous of hearing and contradicting his mother’s point of view.