Sylvia went up to her and gave her a sudden, violent slap between the shoulders. “Now, don’t begin!” she said. “If you do, they’ll all come round us. It isn’t as if we could rush away to the middle of the moors, and you could go on with it as long as you liked. Here, if you howl, you’ll catch it; for they’ll stand over you, and perhaps fling water on your head.”
“Leave me alone, then, for a minute,” said Betty. She flung herself flat on the ground, face downwards, her hair falling about her shoulders. She lay as still as though she were carved in stone. The twin girls watched her for a minute. Then very softly and carefully Sylvia approached the prone figure, pushed her hand into Betty’s pocket (a very coarse, ordinary pocket it was, put in at the side of her dress by Jean’s own fingers), and took out a bunch of keys.
Sylvia held up the keys with a glad smile. “Now let’s begin,” she said. “It’s an odious, grandified room, and Betty’ll go mad here; but we can’t help it—at least, for a bit. And there’s always the packet.”
At these words, to the great relief of her younger sisters, Betty stood upright. “There’s always the packet,” she said. “Now let’s begin to unpack.”
Notwithstanding the fact that there were six deal trunks—six trunks of the plainest make, corded with the coarsest rope—there was very little inside them, at least as far as an ordinary girl’s wardrobe is concerned; for Miss Frances Vivian had been very poor, and during the last year of her life had lived at Craigie Muir in the strictest economy. She was, moreover, too ill to be greatly troubled about the girls’ clothing; and by and by, as her illness progressed, she left the matter altogether to Jean. Jean was to supply what garments the young ladies required, and Jean set about the work with a right good will. So the coarsest petticoats, the most clumsy stockings, the ugliest jackets and blouses and skirts imaginable, presently appeared out of the little wooden trunks.
The girls sorted them eagerly, putting them pell-mell into the drawers without the slightest attempt at any sort of order. But if there were very few clothes in the trunks, there were all sorts of other things. There were boxes full of caterpillars in different stages of chrysalis form. There was also a glass box which contained an enormous spider. This was Sylvia’s special property. She called the spider Dickie, and adored it. She would not give it flies, which she considered cruel, but used to keep it alive on morsels of raw meat. Every day, for a quarter of an hour, Dickie was allowed to take exercise on a flat stone on the edge of the moor. It was quite against even Jean Macfarlane’s advice that Dickie was brought to the neighborhood of London. But he was here. He had borne his journey apparently well, and Sylvia looked at him now with worshiping eyes.
In addition to the live stock, which was extensive and varied, there were also all kinds of strange fossils, and long, trailing pieces of heather—mementos of the life which the girls lived on the moor, and which they had left with such pain and sorrow. They were all busy worshiping Dickie, and envying Sylvia’s bravery in bringing the huge spider to Haddo Court, when there came a gentle tap at the door.
Betty said crossly, “Who’s there?”
A very refined voice answered, “It’s I;” and the next minute Fanny Crawford entered the room. “How are you all?” she said. Her eyes were red, for she had just said good-bye to her father, and she thoroughly hated the idea of the girls coming to the school.
“How are you, Fan?” replied Betty, speaking in a careless tone, just nodding her head, and looking again into the glass box. “He is very hungry,” she continued. “By the way, Fan, will you run down to the kitchen and get a little bit of raw meat?”