With the departure of Captain Baster peace settled on Colet House; and Sir Maurice enjoyed very much his three days’ stay. The Twins, though they were in that condition of subdued vivacity into which they always fell after a signal exploit that came to their mother’s notice, were very pleasant companions; and the peaceful life and early hours of Little Deeping were grateful after the London whirl. Also he had many talks with his sister on the matter of settling down in life, a course of action she frequently urged on him.
When he went the Twins felt a certain dulness. It was not acute boredom; they were preserved from that by the fact that the Terror went every morning to study the classics with the vicar, and Erebus learned English and French with her mother. Their afternoon leisure, therefore, rarely palled on them.
One afternoon, as they came out of the house after lunch, Erebus suggested that they should begin by ambushing Wiggins. They went, therefore, toward Mr. Carrington’s house which stood nearly a mile away on the outskirts of Little Deeping, and watched it from the edge of the common. They saw their prey in the garden; and he tried their patience by staying there for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Then he came briskly up the road to the common. Their eyes began to shine with the expectation of immediate triumph, when, thirty yards from the common’s edge, in a sudden access of caution, he bolted for covert and disappeared in the gorse sixty yards away on their left. They fell noiselessly back, going as quickly as concealment permitted, to cut him off. They were successful. They caught him crossing an open space, yelled “Bang!” together; and in accordance with the rules of the game Wiggins fell to the ground.
They scalped him with yells of such a piercing triumph that the immemorial oaks for a quarter of a mile round emptied themselves hastily of the wood-pigeons feeding on their acorns.
Wiggins rose gloomily, gloomily took from his knickerbockers pocket his tattered and grimy notebook, gloomily made an entry in it, and gloomily said: “That makes you two games ahead.” Then he spurned the earth and added: “I’m going to have a bicycle.”
The Twins looked at each other darkly; Erebus scowled, and a faint frown broke the ineffable serenity of the Terror’s face.
“There’ll be no living with Wiggins now, he’ll be so cocky,” said Erebus bitterly.
“Oh, no; he won’t,” said the Terror. “But we ought to have bicycles, too. We want them badly. We never get really far from the village. We always get stopped on the way—rats, or something.” And his guileless, dreamy blue eyes swept the distant autumn hills with a look of yearning.
“There are orchards over there where they don’t know us,” said Erebus wistfully.