The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the changed meals as much as the boys—Cameron had quite a boyish appetite for good things, and Hermie's brilliant menus had been delightful to him after a long course of Miss Macintosh's boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle roly-polies, and milk sagos.
'A first-rate little manager,' he always called her, when he passed up his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more expensive than rhubarb or rice.
'Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!' she said, awake at last to the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction, and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.
'But I am eleven,' she kept repeating sadly, 'eleven, papa. I ought to have known.'
There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys' school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother's conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.
But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over heavy.
But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.
The father's blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.
'Is my son a thief,' he said, 'that he should treat me so? Or is it he despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?'
With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.