“I should never hear the last of it.”
“Well, then,” she said, looking meditatively at Claudia, “you three are provided for.”
“Three?” said Fenwick quickly.
“Yes, Charlie—Charlie Carter. You always try to forget him.”
“He ought to be forgotten. He’s not in the least wanted. Good heavens! a boy who plays practical jokes!”
“That is why I want you to look after him,” said Lady Wilmot in a firm voice. “Besides, he must go. Lady Bodmin agrees with me.”
Fenwick flung an aggrieved glance at Claudia, but she was gazing out of the window. In her heart she was saying joyfully—
“He may play practical jokes as much as he likes, and I shall take care he is not forgotten. If worse comes to worst I’ll fetch him myself.”
But this sense of relief was so derogatory to the standard of the professional young woman which she had set up, that she was torn by different feelings, extremely pleased when Charlie Carter arrived, dripping, from a practical investigation of the Black Pond, yet so ashamed of clinging to such a fossilised an institution as a chaperon, that she took herself to task for not agreeing to Captain Fenwick’s strongly expressed desire to start and leave the boy to follow. When she refused he hinted at a chancre in herself.
“When we came here, you didn’t mind trusting yourself to me.”