"Am I to call you Charlie, too?" asked Montagu, who was rather jealous where his tutor's favour was concerned.
"Pray, don't!" exclaimed that gentleman hastily.
"Chahlee, Chahlee," crowed Edmund from the safe vantage ground of Mr. Wycherly's arms as he was carried upstairs. "Deah man, Chahlee."
Miss Esperance sat on where she was. Her interference had certainly not improved matters, and she was really perturbed. That she should in any way, however inadvertently and innocently, have rendered Mr. Wycherly in the smallest degree ridiculous was most distressing to her.
Had the baby done his best, or was it but one more instance of his supreme subtlety in the avoidance of doing what he was told?
Miss Esperance adored Edmund. He was a Bethune from the top curl of his fair hair to his small, straight, pink toes. Handsome, ruddy, with very blue eyes; eyes that changed in colour with his every emotion, even as the sea so many of his forbears had served changes with the passing hours; he was the image of Archie Bethune, his father. He was like her brother, whose name he bore, and still stronger was his likeness to the admiral, her father, that generous and choleric sailor whose memory she so revered.
Yet no one knew better than Miss Esperance the faults of the Bethune temperament. Had she not suffered from them herself in the past? And she was painfully anxious to keep in check the wilful impulsiveness so strongly marked in her great-nephew—that taking of their own way, no matter at what cost in tribulation to themselves or suffering to others. How many Bethunes had it ruined in the past! And yet if she rebuked him now it might confuse the baby: and above all, Miss Esperance desired to be just in her dealings with these small creatures committed to her charge.
As she sat in the sunshine, with the children's voices borne to her on the soft winds of early summer, she prayed for guidance.
Suddenly the children's voices ceased, for Mr. Wycherly was reading aloud. It was his habit to read to them odd scraps of anything that had happened to please himself, while they munched their biscuits. Sometimes they, or at all events Montagu, understood; as often they did not: but both found some sort of pleasure in the fine English gracefully read. Miss Esperance listened, and as if in answer to her prayer she heard, in Mr. Wycherly's gentle, cultivated tones, these words: "Love is fitter than fear, gentleness better than beating, to bring up a child rightly in learning."
So for a while Baby Edmund was allowed to call Mr. Wycherly very much what he pleased. He occasionally conceded something to convention by addressing him as "Mittah man" or "Mittah Chahlee"—but as a rule he took his own way; finally adopting for Mr. Wycherly Elsa's usual style of address toward himself, namely, "Dearie."