“Very well.” Augusta spoke in quite a cheerful tone. “I will do what you wish and sign the paper, and you can keep it and show it to me to remind me of my promise when we get back to London. In the meantime you mustn’t talk any more of this nonsense. You mustn’t worry me from morning to night as you have been doing ever since I have had the pleasure of knowing you. And there is still something more.”
“I won’t talk of it; and I’ll be very, very grateful,” said Nancy.
“Well; child, so far so good; but now for my real condition. Do you know, Nancy, that you—you little wretch!—have just got me into a most horrible scrape?”
“How?” asked Nancy, fixing her wondering eyes on Augusta’s face.
“You have, you monkey—you have. This is what you have done. When I was talking to you just now in the shrubbery, and giving you some plain words with regard to your conduct, you put on the airs of a martyr, and, lo and behold, little Miss Martyr! somebody listened, and somebody was very angry.”
“Whom?” asked the child.
“No less a person than my aunt Jessie. You ran away in one of your fits of passion and left me to face the brunt of the storm. Didn’t I get it, too? Oh, Aunt Jessie was in a rage! She spoke of you as if you were a poor, half-murdered angel. I declare it was sickening to hear her. And there is worse to follow. You know what we all think of Uncle Peter and his scheme, and how anxious we are to get the best that he can give us; and I want the Royal Cross that he has promised to the most victorious.”
“Oh no, Augusta,” said Nancy, with a faint and quickly suppressed smile; “you can’t mean that you are going in for that.”
“And why not, miss? I mean to go in for it.”
“Well, but the Royal Cross is for valour and noble conduct, and—Augusta, you can’t mean it.”