Ronald felt inclined to remind Ralph that, if he were not in the habit of feeling squeamish over other people’s knocks, he made quite enough fuss over his own, for Isobel or Claude would laugh over a bruise or a cut which would send their elder brother into the house in tears; but he remembered that he was Ralph’s guest, so like a gentleman he kept back the hasty words, and set off in silence to see how it was faring with the party outside.
Isobel lay down with a story-book on the schoolroom sofa, andsoon fell into a heavy sleep. | |
| V. L. | [Page 64]. |
He met them just beyond the lodge; and, although Isobel was walking slowly, the colour had come back to her face, and she replied cheerily to his anxious question that she was all right, and that her head did not ache so badly now.
Perhaps if Mrs Osbourne had come home in time for the children’s early dinner she might not have been deceived so easily by the little girl’s assurances; but, thinking that the children would be quite safe as long as Ronald and Ralph were with them, she had stayed to spend the afternoon with an old aunt of Mr Osbourne’s whom she found in bed with a bad attack of bronchitis; and although Anne, who waited on the children at dinner-time, noticed the child’s dull eyes and listless manner, she only said, ‘Surely you are not hungry, Miss Isobel,’ as she took away her almost untouched plate; and Isobel, after dawdling about with Claude for a little, helping him to set out all his soldiers in a row on the edge of the bath, ready to salute as his new man-of-war was launched, lay down with a story-book on the schoolroom sofa, and soon fell into a heavy sleep.
The frost had given way, and the afternoon was dull and wet, so there was no prospect of getting out, and employment had to be found indoors. Soon Ralph, tired of his book, and more sociably inclined than usual, proposed that they should go up to an unused room at the top of the house, where he had a carpenter’s bench and a set of tools, and begin to hollow out a log which he intended making into a boat. Both Ronald and he were good craftsmen, and they were soon busy with hammer and chisel, while Vivian found employment for his fingers in whittling the corners off a piece of wood which was destined to form a funnel.
The noise of hammering prevented much talking, and his own thoughts did not seem to be very pleasant, for the cheery whistling, which Mrs Armitage was wont to say always told her when Vivian was about, soon stopped, and a frown gathered on his handsome little face. Presently he laid down the piece of wood and left the room.
The lie that he had told, or acted rather, in letting his aunt believe that he knew nothing of the lost pistol was weighing heavily on his conscience, and the remembrance of the paper parcel lying on the top of the wardrobe in his room, ready to be found by any prying servant, haunted him.
The very thought of the pistol was hateful to him now. He wondered why he had ever wanted it, and he wished that he could get rid of it anyhow, anywhere. But to do so was not so easy. He was never out alone, or he might have thrown it into one of the ponds on the Heath; and although the idea of burying it came into his mind, he remembered what Isobel had told him about Monarch the great watch-dog hiding bones in the corners of the flower-beds whenever he had a chance, and scraping them up again just when the gardener had sown some special kind of seed there or bedded out some favourite plant. No, it certainly would not be safe to hide the packet in the ground.