"It won't make them better to worry her," said Eustace shortly.
"But how could you say it is splendid?" Nesta said with a choke.
"Well, isn't it?" said Eustace. "I was thinking about the house and the park. It was not the people mother told us about before we came, but the place."
"Grannie and grandfather are not a bit like what I thought," Nesta remarked in an aggrieved tone.
"They are very beautiful," said Eustace in an awed voice. "They somehow match the house and everything in it, and it seems to make them much too grand for us."
"I know Herbert and Brenda think themselves much too grand for us," said Nesta crossly. "Fancy their thinking such silly things about the way we lived, just as if we weren't ladies and gentlemen! Why, last night, when Brenda told me we were to go in to dessert, she said, 'You know people always dress for dinner in England,' in that snubby way of hers; and I laughed right out, and said, 'Goodness, father and mother dress for dinner every night at home.'"
"I think they fancy we are sort of savages," said Eustace. "It makes me feel inclined to be one, and give them a shock."
Dessert the evening before had proved a very dull affair, and the time in the drawing-room afterwards, playing halma with the cousins, was worse. They all four hailed bedtime with thankfulness. Never before had Eustace and Nesta felt so shut in—so pinned down and overawed. Never, thought Herbert and Brenda, had they met such queer, unresponsive children.
At breakfast they found Becky entirely at home with her keeper, who had a grave kind of way of smiling down upon the small person and Peter.
"You had better come and see the house now," said Herbert immediately after breakfast. "I'm going off rabbit-shooting later."