Prudence reached home to discover that she was late. Miss Agatha met her in the hall, already dressed for the evening meal, which was the most important function of the day, and at which no one was expected to put in a tardy appearance. Miss Agatha glanced from the warning face of the great clock at the foot of the staircase to the sweet flushed face of her young sister, and from thence to her dust-soiled shoes.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “Don’t you see the time?”
“I’ll hurry,” Prudence answered. “It won’t take me three minutes to change. I’ve been for a tramp.”
“You have a deceitful habit,” Miss Agatha admonished her, “of slipping away from the house without informing anyone. If you were less selfish it might occur to you that your sisters would like to accompany you occasionally. I can’t understand why you prefer to walk alone.”
“I shall be late,” Prudence said, with her foot on the stair, “if I stay to go into that now.”
And with a rebellious face she ran upstairs, leaving Miss Agatha, aghast and indignant, looking up from the foot of the staircase after her vanishing figure. Prudence was getting altogether out of hand.
“She tramps the country,” William affirmed on learning the trouble, “like a factory girl. I won’t have my sister making herself so noticeable—mooning about the lanes and hanging over stiles. It—it isn’t respectable.”
“I wish,” Miss Agatha said, meanly shifting responsibility, “that you would put your foot down. If you were firm she might possibly respect your wishes. I can do nothing with her.”
“M’m!” William coughed gently, and assumed an expression which he hoped conveyed the air of inflexibility he deemed suited to the responsible position thus conferred on him. “I’ll see to it,” he said; and felt relieved when the gong sounded in advance of Prudence’s entry, and so deferred the moment for exercising his authority.
He was less confident than Agatha that firmness on his part would produce the result desired. He had in mind the occasion when he had insisted upon an apology before the resumption of fraternal relations with his young sister. He had maintained a dignified silence until the thing threatened to become ridiculous, and still the apology had not been forthcoming: he had been forced to capitulate; and the memory of that defeat rankled. But the lesson had been salutary in so far that it discouraged him from straining his authority to a point whence it aggravated to open revolt. Defiance was a quality which defeated William’s statesmanship.