“What?”
“My eye.”
“William, I b’lieve.”
“Well, it is a very good thing he was sent about his business. Go on with your sum.”
Lord Gawdor did as he was bid, and there was silence for a while, broken only by the squeaking of his pencil on the slate and an occasional clicking sound from under the table, where Selina, his youngest sister, aged five, was seated on the floor playing with a box of bricks. They were in the day nursery, which was also the schoolroom, of Glen Druid Park, a great old Irish country house.
Little Lord Gawdor’s mother was dead and his father was in India. He and his sisters were living with their grandmother, Lady Seagrave. It was three weeks before Christmas, and as Lady Seagrave had invited a house-party, the house was in a state of upset owing to the preparations. Downstairs rooms were being cleaned and dusted, carpets taken up and shaken, mirrors polished, and mattresses standing to air before huge fires.
All the fun of a general house-cleaning was going on, and it seemed very hard to Lord Gawdor and Doris that they had to sit all the morning doing sums and making maps instead of helping to increase the confusion down below.
“I’ve done my sum,” said his lordship at last.
“When I have finished demarcating this frontier I will look at it,” said Miss Kiligrew, who had a paint brush in her hand, and was in the act of tinting with red the boundary line between Cochin China and Somewhere-else.
“All right,” said the boy; “don’t hurry, I can wait as long as you like.” He left the chair and, going to the window, he climbed on to the window-seat and looked out at the park. He had scarcely been a minute at the window when he gave a cry.