"Oh, let her have her head," he finished finally. And he liked that idea so well that he repeated it. "Let her have her head. Do you understand me? Never mind what's in the old schoolbooks. If she'd rather take a walk than study Latin verbs, well, let her. I want her to be happy here—happy, that's most important. You've heard of flowers that bloom only in shelter and sunshine? This youngster isn't unlike—"
"Well, I never! No, I never!... I never!" Mrs. Budge's gasp, rising in a crescendo, almost betrayed her presence. She gave a pillow a mighty jab. As though it were not bad enough to bring the girl to the house in the first place without paying a man a fancy price to teach her to have her own way! "Flowers! Humph! Old fools—" Unable to endure another word in silence she stalked off to her own quarters.
In the butler's pantry she found Beryl arranging real flowers in a squatty Bristol glass bowl and humming gaily as she did so. Now Beryl should have beep upstairs marking the new linen and she should not be singing as though she owned the whole world. These two transgressions and the sight of the bright blossoms in the girl's hand brought the climax to the old woman's wrath. All Beryl's shortcomings tumbled off her tongue in an incoherent flow of ill-temper. A stormy scene resulted which left the old housekeeper spent and Beryl blazing with indignation.
Consequently, when poor Robin, depressed from her first hour with the tutor, trying not to feel that Gray Manor was going to be a prison instead of a castle, sought out her new friend she found her throwing her few possessions into a cheap suitcase that lay, opened, across her narrow bed.
"Oh, what are you doing?" cried Robin in alarm.
"I'm going—that's what. She fired me."
Robin's first thought upon awaking that morning had been of Beryl; she had suffered the keenest impatience all through the trying morning, longing to go in search of her new friend. She could not lose her now—for a hundred Budges.
"Oh, I won't let you go!"
"A lot you could do!" cried Beryl scornfully, tears very close. "I just can't please the old thing. But I hate to go home." She sat down, dolefully, on the edge of the bed. "I wanted to stay until I had earned two hundred dollars."
Two hundred dollars! That seemed such a very big amount of money to Robin that she sat silent, thinking about it.