“Of course she will,” insisted Margot. “Oh, do hurry!”
But evidently such a verb was unknown in the vocabulary of the rector’s Jim; for five minutes Margot stood at the pony’s head in a fever and ferment of excitement; then her powers of endurance gave out.
“Oh, how slow they are in England!” she lamented, “and that boy, I declare he’s——!” A sudden idea flashed into her mind before even she had finished the sentence. “I’ll just not wait for him,” she said; “I’ll go! Stella’ll guess when she finds the trap gone; I’m sure I can drive quicker than he would, too; and who knows where Sybil mayn’t be by this time?”
Without losing another moment she hopped up into the trap, shut the little door with an incisive click and, with a professional shake to the reins, was off and away down the road in the direction of the “Little House.”
If it hadn’t been for the nature of her errand Margot would have been in the seventh heaven of delight. Behind her was the Cliff School, with its rules and regulations; even its delights—her friends and the hockey match—were forgotten for a time; before her was the long winding road with the moors on either hand, and there was no sound to be heard but the thud-thud of the pony’s feet. She felt almost as though the old days were back again; that she was as free as the air, and as wild as the gulls that were circling round the cliffs. “Almost” she felt like this, but not quite, for deep down in her heart the strongest feeling of all was fear lest Sybil, having ventured forth to the “Little House” in a state of pique against her sister and her cousin, might come to harm if she were not turned back in time.
“For it is partly my fault,” Margot found herself reiterating in time to the pony’s trotting feet; “and I have been rather a beast to her lately; and if she gets frightened at the gipsies, or anything——”
Margot touched the pony lightly with the whip at the prompting of the thought, and urged him onwards, only half-conscious that in her heart was being born a new kind of affection for the aggravating little cousin who was so “frightfully babyish.”
“Of course, I’ve been in Australia, and she hasn’t; and I’ve had mother——; and I’m a perfect beast to think her always so silly, when it isn’t her fault hardly at all.” This was the final summing-up of Margot’s thoughts, and perhaps it was just as well that she had finished her recriminations, for at that very minute the rector’s pony, having traversed about half of the way to the station, thought well to fall down suddenly on his two front knees!
The truth was that he wasn’t used to being driven so furiously, on account of the fact that the rector had picked him up cheap at a sale because of a previous accident that had left him with two broken knees. The experienced Margot should have known that, she told herself furiously.
“If I’d had the sense to look at his knees before I started I’d have known they’d been broken before,” she announced in contrition and annoyance, as she stood in the middle of the road surveying the victim, who, plainly sorry for himself, had scrambled up again with his driver’s help, and now presented a desolate spectacle.