"Pretty poll! pretty poll! Scratch a poll, polly!" cried Puck softly, capering on the grass-plot as the lady disappeared.
"You are a very rude little boy," said Prissy with an air of displeasure and a glance at Esther, as much as to ask her why she did not reprove such impertinence; but Bertie made a dash at Puck, seized him by the hand, and cried out,—
"Come along! come along! Oh, won't we have some fun now!"
Immediately the three boys dashed off together full tilt, and Milly, after a wavering glance in the direction of her sister and Esther, rushed headlong after them. The elder pair were left for the moment alone, and Prissy looked inquiringly into Esther's flushed face.
"I don't think your cousins are very nice boys," she remarked with some severity; "I should think they have been very badly brought up."
Esther felt a little tingle of vexation at hearing her cousins thus criticised, though after all she was not quite sure that she could deny Prissy's charge.
"They have no mother, you see," she said.
"Ah, well, perhaps that does make a difference. Fathers often spoil their children, when there is no mother; I've heard mama say so herself," she said. "You will have to be a little mother to them, Esther, and teach them better. I'm not going to hear my mother called names, and I shall tell them so."
Prissy proceeded to do this with great firmness when the children met a little later. Pickle listened to her speech with most decorous gravity, while Puck's pretty face dimpled all over with laughter.
"Pretty polly! pretty polly!—doesn't she talk well!" he exclaimed; and to Prissy's infinite astonishment and dismay, Milly and Bertie rolled to and fro in helpless mirth, whilst Pickle looked up in her flushed face and said,—