Queenie listened with interest to this account of the little stranger; but she would not admit that she could possibly be mistaken in her estimate of him.
“I’ve seen him,” she said; “he was dressed in horrid old clothes. I’m quite sure he can’t be a gentleman’s son. It’s quite ridiculous!”
“And I suppose, Miss Queenie, if you happened to get lost some day, and were found by poor people, and dressed in poor clothes, you would not be a gentleman’s little daughter any longer?”
Queenie flushed indignantly, and drew up her little head.
“I am Sir Walter Arbuthnot’s only daughter,” she said, in her most stately way. “Nothing that could happen could make any difference to that.”
Nurse smiled again.
“Oh, I thought it was all a matter of clothes.”
Queenie made no reply. She began to see that there was something more than that to be taken into consideration; but she was not going to make any rash admissions to her nurse, whose ideas upon some subjects did not at all commend themselves to the little lady.
But she thought a good deal about the little boy who had come to the Manor House, and wove several romances about him. She wondered whether she would ever make his acquaintance, what he would be like if she did, and whether he would prove worthy of the notice she half resolved she would take of him should the opportunity present itself.
Queenie, as will be seen from what has gone before, was a little lady with a great idea of her own importance. It was not altogether her own fault that she had this exalted opinion of herself. She was an only daughter, and had been spoiled ever since she was born. The youngest of the family and the only girl, it was no wonder she had been made much of, and her beauty, her self-will, and her quickness all helped to increase the dangers and difficulties of the position. Her father gave way to her whims in everything, whenever she appealed to him, for he was much entertained by her vivacity and delighted in her fearlessness and high spirit. He secretly countenanced those acts of insubordination and defiance of authority that shocked Lady Arbuthnot’s sense of propriety, and cared nothing at all about her “tomboy tricks” so long as she was always ready to amuse him by her sharp sayings when she came in to dessert or was sent for into the drawing-room. The mother, on the other hand, disliked all this tendency to frolic and careless deportment, and sedulously cultivated what she termed the graceful side of her little daughter’s character. In plain words, she tried hard to instill a great deal of vanity and foolish pride into Queenie’s youthful mind, and had it not been for the child’s healthy love for play and natural freedom from petty follies of this kind, she would in all probability have become before this time a little woman of fashion instead of a happy, careless child.