Geoffrey could bear it no longer. He rose pale and trembling, and was on the point of leaving the nursery, when nurse hearing herself called, hurried away.
The three boys stood watching their little sister with perplexed faces.
"There's something quite wrong about the frock," said Geoffrey, his brow puckered into a distressed frown, "it looks dreadful."
"Why it's ever so much too long of course," said Forbes, "If I dared to use Nurse's scissors, I'd cut it round the bottom, it would look much better. I'm quite sure Mother wouldn't like it."
"And if Father comes home as Nurse thinks he will, he'll never guess how pretty Dodie really is," added Geoff.
"Anyhow," remonstrated Jack, "she'll be nice and warm as Nurse says, and will have plenty of room to grow in it,—and Nurse is quite sure to know what is best." Jack added this bravely as the last time he had made a similar remark it had been allowed to go unreproved.
"Nurse does not always know best," said Forbes. "Don't you remember how often she used to want to give us gregory powder and rhubarb pills if we were a little ill, and Mother never would let her. Of course she wouldn't know so well as Mother what was best to do, and why just because Mother has gone to Heaven," added Forbes, with a curious expression about his mouth which his brothers understood, "Dodie is made to look so sad and so—so ugly, I can't think."
"She doesn't look ugly, she couldn't," said Geoffrey, as he watched the child frisking about the room, so taken up with her new frock, that she was entirely unconscious that her brothers were looking at her, and talking of her.
Dodie was a lovely little girl. Her hair was curiously light, the very palest shade of gold, her eyes dark brown, and she had the sweetest most kissable little mouth imaginable. She was so small too, that though she was three years old, she looked like a little doll walking about. Any mother's heart would have ached at the sight of these three motherless boys watching with such sad sombre faces their baby sister.
Geoffrey loved this little sister next best to his mother, and nothing she could do, ever vexed him. She might pull his hair, stuff her fingers down his neck, pluck off ruthlessly the finest blossoms from his favourite plants, throw his pet books recklessly on the floor, thereby breaking their backs, scribble over his carefully written Latin exercise, and yet he could not find the heart to be angry with her.