‘You are much quicker, though,’ said Ronald, not to be outdone in brotherly generosity; ‘you can do things in half the time that I take to do them. But hurry up, old chap; run along and find your things, or the bell will ring before you get down again.’
‘All right,’ answered Vivian; and as he spoke he threw his coat over his arm, and ran across the front hall, and disappeared through the swing door which separated it from the back staircase, in order to gather together the rest of his belongings as he went upstairs.
But although Ronald had plenty of time to go upstairs and hang everything in his wardrobe in his leisurely way, and come down again and join the others in the dining-room before the breakfast-bell rang, it was fully five minutes before Vivian reappeared.
‘Whatever can he be doing?’ asked Uncle Walter, as he rapidly cut slices of bread and served out the bacon and eggs. ‘His coffee will be quite cold.’
‘Gathering all his things together, in case mother fines him a halfpenny for each of them,’ laughed Isobel. ‘I have frightened him by telling him what Miss Ritchie does to us.’
‘But you are a girl, and girls have always to learn to keep the house tidy,’ said Ralph in his lofty way. ‘It is of far more consequence for a woman to be tidy than for a man.—Isn’t it, mother?’
‘Certainly not,’ said his mother; ‘and if those are the notions that you are learning at St Chad’s we will have to put on the halfpenny fine in the holidays to counteract them. I expect you to be just as tidy as Isobel—tidier, in fact, because you are older.’
At this moment Vivian appeared, and his entrance put an end to the discussion, for every one began laughingly to ask him if it had taken him five minutes to hang up his coat, but he did not seem to be as ready with an answer as he generally was, and, slipping into his place between Ralph and Claude, he began to eat his breakfast hurriedly, as if to make up for lost time. He kept his face bent so steadily over his plate that no one noticed until breakfast was over that he had a big blue bruise on one of his temples, which looked as though he had struck his face against something sharp. It was little Claude who saw it first, and he cried out at once, in spite of Vivian’s hurried whisper to keep quiet.
‘Come here, mother, and see how Vivian has hurt himself; he has got a great bump over one of his eyes. Hadn’t he better have eau de Cologne on it?’
To Claude, the idea of being petted by mother, and having nice-smelling stuff put on his knocks and bruises, quite compensated for the pain of them, and he could not understand why Vivian tried to escape upstairs before his aunt came hurriedly from the kitchen, where she had gone to have an interview with cook.