“Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!” said Lavendar. “Restrain these flights of imagination! Don’t you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?”
Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon 96 all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday.
“Do you get enough to eat here?” asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in the drawing-room before lunch.
“Of course I have enough, Middy,” answered Robinetta with unconscious reservation. She had rejected “Carnaby” at once as a name quite impossible: he was “Middy” to her almost from the first moment of their acquaintance.
“Enough?” he ejaculated, “I don’t! I’d never be fed if it weren’t for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky.” Bates was the butler, Mrs. Smith the housekeeper, and Cooky her satellite. “Nobody gets enough to eat in this house!” added Carnaby darkly, “except the dog.”
At the lunch-table, the antagonism natural between a hot-blooded impetuous boy and a grandmother such as Mrs. de Tracy became rather painfully apparent. He had already been hauled over the coals for his arrival on 97 Sunday and his indecorous appearance in church after service had begun.
“It does not appear to me that you are at all in need of sick-leave,” said Mrs. de Tracy suspiciously.
Carnaby, sensitive for all his robustness, flushed hotly, and then became impertinent. “My pulse is twenty beats too quick still, after quinsy. If you don’t believe the doctor, ma’am, it’s not my fault.”
“Carnaby has committed indiscretions in the way of growing since I last saw him,” Lavendar broke in hastily. “At sixteen one may easily outgrow one’s strength!”
“Indeed!” said Mrs. de Tracy, frigidly. The situation was saved by the behaviour of the lap-dog, which suddenly burst into a passion of barking and convulsive struggling in Miss Smeardon’s arms. His enemy had come, and Carnaby had fifty ways of exasperating his grandmother’s favourite, secrets between him and the bewildered dog. Rupert was a Prince Charles of pedigree as 98 unquestioned as his mistress’s and an appearance dating back to Vandyke, but Carnaby always addressed him as “Lord Roberts,” for reasons of his own. It annoyed his grandmother and it infuriated the dog, who took it for a deadly insult.