“What I said was for the best,” said Kinsella.
“How was I to know she’d be here at the latter end?”
“You couldn’t know, of course. Nobody ever can; which is one of the reasons why it’s just as well to tell the truth at the start whenever possible. If you make things up you generally forget afterwards what they are, and then there’s trouble. Besides the things you make up very often turn against you in ways you’d never expect. It was just the same with a mouse-trap that Sylvia Courtney once bought, when she thought there was a mouse in our room, though there wasn’t really and it wouldn’t have done her any harm if there had been. No matter how careful she was about tying the string down it used to bound up again and nip her fingers. But Sylvia Courtney never was any good at things like mouse-traps. What she likes is English Literature.”
“How did you stop her going to the far end of the island?” said Frank, “if she thought there was an infectious fever for Mr. Pennefather to catch——”
“I dare say you mentioned the wild heifer,” said Priscilla.
“I did not then. What I said was rats.”
“Rather mean of you that,” said Priscilla. “The rats were Peter Walsh’s originally. You shouldn’t have taken them. That’s what’s called—What is it called, Cousin Frank? Something to do with plagues, I know. Is there such a word as plague-ism? Anyhow it’s what poets do when they lift other poets’ rhymes and it’s considered mean.”
“It was me told Peter Walsh about the rats,” said Kinsella, repelling an unjust accusation. “The way they came swimming in on the tide would surprise you, and the gulls picking the eyes out of the biggest of them as they came swimming along. But that wouldn’t stop them.”
“I’ll just run up and have a word with Barnabas,” said Priscilla. “It’ll be as well for him to know that father and Lord Torrington are out after him today in the Tortoise.”
“Do you tell me that?” said Kinsella.