This was ever Miss Bibby’s phrase—ever her gentle optimism. If you lost your temper, your manners, your courage, any of your higher qualities, you had “forgotten yourself,” forgotten the fine, upright man you were by nature and become for a moment the shadowy ghost of that black unknown self that ever dogs one.
“As I have finished, I will ask you to excuse me, little girls,” Miss Bibby continued, rising from her seat. In point of fact, she had not yet consumed the whole of her slender meal, but who was to say what a boy with such a red, fierce little face might be doing?
She crossed the grass with troubled eyes. Max was too busy a little man to have fits like this often.
Now and again in wet weather, certainly, when he could not work off any superfluous steam in the garden, he had lately taken to flinging himself flat on the floor and kicking, if thwarted in any way. And Miss Bibby had vaguely recognized that this was due to his being deprived so long of the healthy moral tone of the presence of his mother and father—the latter in especial.
Anna opined that the easiest way to get him out of these “tantrums” was to bribe [p211] him with the offer of a large piece of chocolate.
“He’s only a baby,” she would say excusingly, “and besides, he’s a boy—it’s in him and it’s got to come out,—same as a measle rash. You’d think there’d be some med’cin for it, wouldn’t you?”
Kinross would have enjoyed the notion—the need of a Tonic for Eliminating the Black Corpuscles from the Blood of Boys.
Max saw Miss Bibby coming. In truth he had almost forgotten his recent revolt against law and order, for during his tumultuous passage through the garden, he had come across one of the guinea-pigs that had escaped from its bondage. An exciting chase had followed, but he had won, and in the satisfaction consequent upon victory he might have even been induced to overlook Miss Bibby’s behaviour.
But then he saw the gentle reproach in her eyes, and noted (the Judge himself had not the faculty of lightning observation possessed by his son) the nervous, half-conciliatory trepidation of her manner. He thrust his hands as deeply as they would go into his inadequate pockets and met her gaze unblinking.
“Why, Maxie,” she said, “I can’t believe this is the good little boy who was here yesterday. No, it is some other bad little fellow who has taken his suit and looks like him. [p212] Do you think if I look carefully about I could find my good little boy again?”