“I’ll try,” said Kate.
Adam whimpered a little longer; but then he also said, “I’ll try.”
“That is right. That is the least you can say after your extraordinary behaviour. Now you may go with the lady, as she is so kind as to wish it.”
Lady Carse moved off in silence; and the children, tightly grasping each other’s hands, followed as if going to a funeral.
“Jump, my dears,” said papa, when they had reached the down. “Jump about: you may be merry now.”
Both looked as if they were immediately going to cry. “What now, Adam?” stooping down that the child might speak confidentially to him, but saying to Lady Carse as he did so, that it was necessary sometimes to condescend to the weakness of children. “Adam, tell me why you are not merry, when I assure you you may.”
“I can’t,” whispered Adam.
“You can’t! What a sudden fit of humility this boy has got, that he can’t do anything to-day. Unless, however, it be true, well-grounded humility, I fear—”
Mamma now tried what she could do. She saw, by Lady Carse’s way of walking on by herself, that she was displeased; and, under the inspiration of this grief, Mrs Ruthven so strove to make her children agreeable by causing them to forget everything disagreeable, that they were soon like themselves again. Mamma permitted them to look for hens’ eggs among the whins, because they had heard that when she was a little girl she used to look for them among bushes in a field. There was no occasion to tell them at such a critical moment for their spirits that it was mid-winter, or that whins would be found rather prickly by poultry, or that there were no hens in the island but Mrs Macdonald’s well sheltered pets. They were told that the first egg they found was to be presented to Lady Carse; and they themselves might divide the next.
Their mother’s hope, that if they did not find hens’ eggs, they might light upon something else, was not disappointed. Perhaps she took care that it should not. Adam found a barley-cake on the sheltered side of a bush; and it was not long before Kate found one just as good. They were desired to do with these what they would have done with the eggs—present one to Lady Carse and divide the other. As they were very hungry, they hastened to fulfil the condition of beginning to eat. Again grasping one another’s hands, they walked with desperate courage up to Lady Carse, and held out a cake, without yet daring, however, to look up.