‘Oh, I know more then you think, Miss,’ said Harriet, tossing her head. ‘I’ve ways of my own of finding out what I want to know. I know a sure spell to find out the gentleman’s name you’re going to marry,’ she added rather in a hurry. ‘I’ll show you some time, if this blows over and you don’t have to leave on account of it.’
‘Bother marrying,’ said Charlotte briefly. ‘I don’t mean to marry any one. I shall be an Arctic explorer, and sail in the cold waters of the North.’
‘It’s hot water you’ll be in first,’ said Harriet. ‘Don’t answer her back’s my advice. Then p’raps it’ll blow over. Least said soonest mended’s what I say. They can’t go on at you for ever if you don’t answer ’em back.’
‘If you don’t answer they say you’re sulky,’ said Charles, who sometimes noticed things.
‘No, they don’t, Master Charles; not if you keep on saying “Yes’m” and “No’m” every time they stops for breath. That’s the way to egg-sauce ’em, trust me it is.’
The three C.’s did not quite see their way to exhaust Mrs. Wilmington by saying “Yes’m” and “No’m” in answer to her reproaches, and they felt that she would not understand if they tried to explain why they had done what they did do. So they had rather a poor time with Mrs. Wilmington, who said a good deal about the rose leaves, and told them they might have been the death of Rupert, ‘when really,’ as Caroline said afterwards, ‘they had been the life and soul of his getting better.’
Mrs. Wilmington also told them that they were not to think of going out and getting into any more of their dangerous mischief, because their uncle was going to give them a right-down good talking to as soon as the doctor had been.
‘But we may go out to-morrow, mayn’t we?’ Charles asked hopefully. And Mrs. Wilmington replied:
‘Perhaps you won’t be here to-morrow’—a very disquieting remark.
The children remained in the dining-room waiting for that right-down good talking to; and you know what a hateful thing that is to wait for. They sat there miserably, wondering whether Mrs. Wilmington could possibly happen by any extraordinary accident to be right for once, and whether they had done Rupert any harm. They tried to console themselves by saying every half minute or so, ‘But Rupert is better, all the same,’ and ‘Whatever she says, Rupert is better,’ and things like that.