Children of the Dear Cotswolds

by L. Allen Harker

Would he be good and try to please Aunt Monica and the new nurse, and encourage Jean to be good, and not fret, and try to help all he could?

Just then Robin felt so solemn and exalted that it seemed he could give up anything to help the poor wounded soldiers, and so he said. And after his prayers, mummy tucked him into bed and kissed him, and whispered the things mummies do whisper at such times. Her eyes tasted salt when he kissed them, dragging her head down with his two arms that he might do it—mummy was so tall—and the next day she went away.

She had been gone five whole weeks, and Christmas was not far off, and that Friday afternoon Robin wanted her most desperately, for somehow everything had gone wrong.

It began with digging trenches.

Now to dig a trench properly, as in war, you must lie on your tummy and throw the earth up in front of you; if you stood up, the enemy would pot you—that's an understood thing.

But they didn't seem to realise this at the Vicarage. For when Robin essayed to do it in his own garden—a nice large plot at the far end of the kitchen garden that grandfather had given him for his very own—he naturally got what nurse called "all over mould," and she was far from pleased, the less so in that Jean, coming with nurse to find him, immediately flung herself face downwards in the adjacent carrot-bed in imitation of her brother.

Jean was pretty, and every one fell in love with her at first sight; but Robin was what nurse called a "very or'nary child," and visiting strangers showed no inclination to make a fuss of him.

Grandfather was a very old gentleman, and Aunt Monica was always busy with parish work. Robin had heard his father say that she was "as good as three curates" to grandfather. Therefore did he find himself wishing that she had been, less capable, for, he reasoned, if Aunt Monica was equal to three curates now, and a visiting curate whom Robin liked exceedingly was still necessary—had she been rather less efficient, two visiting curates might have been required. Or, better still, the present one might have been permanent. And this, from Robin's point of view, was most desirable.

The visiting curate came every Sunday to intone the service, read the lessons, help in the Sunday-school, and take the children's service in the afternoon, and he always lunched at the Vicarage.

He was tall, with a cheerful red face and broad shoulders, which made a most comfortable seat for little boys. Moreover, he was a most accomplished person. He could waggle his ears without moving his head, and move his hair up and down without disarranging a muscle of his face. He could shut one eye—"shut flat," Robin called it, "no wrinkles"—and stare at you with the other, and he could wink each eye in succession, in a fashion that conveyed infinite possibilities of merriment. And all these things he contrived to do at the solemn Sunday luncheon when neither grandfather nor Aunt Monica happened to be looking.