“Dear little chap! I thought he was a goner, this morning. I tell you he looked awful when we got him out of that mortar heap!”
“I should think he must! But if Nan has enough to eat, let’s go into the peace-room and have a happy time. I do wonder, every time I’m bad, why I can’t remember then how horrid it feels to be unhappy. I never do, and good resolutions aren’t worth very much above par in my case.”
For a moment Roland did not answer, but went about putting his little stable into order for the night, and finding in the sense of proprietorship this gave him a slight solace for his wounded pride. For it was that, rather than actual repentance, which had tortured him all that afternoon. His nature, prone to idealize everything, had set up a standard of perfect gentlemanliness to be achieved, and the thought that he had been so petty as to lose temper with a woman, and that woman his mother, whom he was most bound to protect, had mortified him intolerably. It may not have been the highest sort of standard, but it was ennobling as far as it went.
When he could find no further excuse for loitering, he went to the pump and begged his sister to dash a stream of cold water over his aching temples; then rising, shook himself like a young water dog, and strode valiantly out of the building.
Bonny did not glance at him again, but taking up her Scottish melody went carolling into the house as if to herald a coming joy.
“Well, darling! Home again! After a long day of work. It is sweet of you to come so gayly, for you must be very tired.”
“And it is perfectly lovely of you, Motherkin, to take each little bit of decency in your offspring and magnify it into a virtue. But you’ll have your reward, my Madonna! You’re going to have part of it—instantly!” cried the girl, nodding her head sagely, and crossing immediately to Robert’s lounge, where she dropped down and fell to caressing that imprisoned piece of activity.
Roland did nothing by halves. He walked directly toward his mother, and said in a clear voice, so that the dreaded “everybody” might hear: “Mother, I beg your pardon. I behaved like a ruffian.”
The ready tears sprung to the mother’s eyes as her tall son bent to kiss her, but she answered as she would have answered any other who had trespassed upon good manners: “Don’t mention it, dear. And I’m glad you are both in together, for Isabelle and I have been experimenting in the kitchen, and by the odor from thence I think our chicken-patties are done and ripe for eating!” Then she rose, took the arm of her “knight,” and led the way to the table.
“Wull, wull, ain’t I a-goin’ ter have nothin’?” demanded the “invalid,” indignantly, as Bonny rose also, and he was threatened with apparent neglect.