“Have you got the thimble?” she asked.
“Of course I haven’t. I don’t know anything about the thimble. What do you mean?”
Alas for Pauline! Her first lie had made her second easy.
Penelope looked at her in puzzled wonder.
“I thought you did know about it,” she said, disappointment stealing over her shrewd little face.
“I don’t know anything about it. Don’t worry me.”
“You are so cross that I’m sure you have done something desperate naughty,” said Penelope. “I want to find out what it is, and I don’t want to stay with you. I think you are horrid.”
She marched away defiantly, her squat little figure and bare legs looking so comical that Pauline burst out laughing.
“What am I coming to?” she said to herself. “This is lie number two. Oh, dear! I feel just as if a net were surrounding me, and the net was being drawn tighter each moment, and I was being dragged into a pit out of which there is no escape. What shall I do?”
Just then Mr. Dale, who seldom left the house, appeared in view. He was walking slowly, his hands thrust into his pockets, his head bent forward; he was murmuring some sentences of his beloved Virgil to himself. He took no notice of Pauline. He did not even see her. Neither did he notice the chair in which she was sitting. He came bang up against her before he knew that she was there.