Miss Bibby’s blood rose high and she started to follow him. But how may a lady who for at least twenty years has done nothing but walk sedately ever expect or wildly hope to catch up a pair of brown muscular little legs? She was brought up panting, with her hand at her side before they had circled the bamboos three times and the quarry was plainly as fresh as ever. But:
“Escape me never, beloved,
While I am I and you are you.”
was Miss Bibby’s attitude now. She called to Anna to help with the chase. And Anna came cheerfully as well as of necessity, for Max had crushed mulberries on her snowy kitchen table, in an endeavour to “invent cochineal,” and it would take her hours to eradicate the stain.
The little girls came too—they felt it was more than half a game, for Max’s face was perfectly smiling and good-natured.
So Pauline stood guard at the waratahs, and Lynn and Anna prevented any more dodging at the bamboos, and Miss Bibby cut [p214] off the retreat to the house and Muffie worried him in the rear.
Surely, surely by tactics like these they drove him right into a corner. Had there been a fence he would have shown fight a little longer by scrambling up it and continuing the chase on the other side. But they had headed him to a hedge, an African box thorn hedge, and there was nothing more to be done. So he stuck his legs apart, and put his hands in his pockets and surveyed his captors as they closed in round him. And it seemed satisfactory to his self-respect that it had taken five of them—two quite grown-up, too—to beat him.
But Anna was singularly without the capacity for admiring fine deeds and simply grasped him firmly around the middle and bore him to the house.
He kicked all the way, merely to maintain his self-respect.
“Where shall I put ’im?” gasped the girl, stumbling along the hall, the other four at her heels.