“Peggy, how dare you?” exclaimed Eve.
“Well, but people don’t like him,” urged the resolute damsel. “He ain’t civil to people, and then we have to suffer for it; for, of course, people think we’re just as bad. He keeps all his good manners for London.”
“Peggy, Peggy!”
“Don’t Peggy me. It’s the truth,” protested this dreadful child; and then she challenged Vansittart boldly, “You like us, Mr. Vansittart, I know you do; but you’ll never be kind to us any more after you’ve seen father.”
This gush of childish candour was discouraging, and Vansittart’s heart sank as he asked himself what manner of man this might be whom he was thinking of as a father-in-law. Other people had spoken ill of Colonel Marchant, and he had made light of their disparagement; but this denunciation from the lips of the eleven-year-old daughter was far more serious.
“Perhaps the Colonel and I may get on better than you expect, Madam Peggy,” he said, with a forced laugh; “and allow me at the same time to suggest that you have forgotten a certain commandment which tells us to honour our fathers and mothers.”
“Are we to honour any kind of father?” asked Peggy; but Vansittart was not called upon to answer, for Hetty at that moment descrying a squirrel, both little girls rushed off to watch his ascent of a tall beech that grew on the grassy waste by which they were walking.
The walk was a long one, but though there was time for Vansittart and Eve to talk about many things, time for the two younger girls to afford many distractions, an undercurrent of thought about the man he was going to see ran beneath all that light surface talk, and made Vansittart’s spirit heavy.
“You must not think anything of what Peggy says,” Eve apologized, directly after that little outbreak of the youngest born. “Father is irritable sometimes. He can’t endure noise, and Hetty and Peggy are dreadfully noisy. And our house is so small—I mean from his point of view. And then he snubs them, poor young things, and they think him unkind.”
“It is a way we have when we are young,” answered Vansittart gently, “to take snubs too seriously. If our parents and guardians could only put themselves inside those small skins of ours they would know what pain their preachings and snubbings inflict.”