“Oh, brewers and shipowners and people,” said Doris with fine contempt. “Who’s Mr Fanshawe?”
“I dunno. I heard Mrs Kinsella say he was a cousin of father’s, and I heard Mary, the between-maid, telling Biddy Mahony he was coming to-day. He’s coming for Christmas, and he’s bringing a lot of horses. Rest of the people are coming to-morrow, but Mr Fanshawe’s been staying with some people hunting forty miles away, and he’s going to drive over.”
“Wonder what he’ll be like? I say, isn’t it rubbish us being stuck up here like this!”
“Let’s send a round-robin to granny to ask her to let’s come down,” suggested Lord Gawdor.
“You don’t know granny!” replied Doris, subsiding into the book she was reading.
They were still prisoners confined to the upper part of the house, and they would have to remain prisoners till the next morning, for their grandmother was an old lady who never went back on her word.
At this moment a knock came to the door, and Patsy entered with a coal-scuttle full of coal.
Patsy, as a rule was a bright-looking boy, enough, but this afternoon his face was very lugubrious and his hair looked tousled. It was always like that when anything, to use his own expression, “addled” him; no brushing would keep it down, it stuck out in all directions. Patsy’s hair was a sort of weather-glass from which you could tell the state of his mind; when angry or fighting it seemed to bristle just as the back of a wire-haired terrier bristles; when he was “addled” it stuck out “every which way” as Mrs Kinsella once said.
“Hullo, Patsy!” cried Lord Gawdor. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go and brush your hair?”
“Bob!” said Doris, “don’t be personal.”