Poor Christie had offended very unconsciously. With her mind full of her letter and all the associations it had awakened, she had been quite unmindful of Miss Gertrude and her attempts to make up the little falling-out of the morning. She only began to realise that the young lady must have been offended, when the days passed over with only a brief visit to Claude. Even then she believed that her vexation rose from what had passed about the book.
But Miss Gertrude was very much out of sorts with herself too. If it had not been a rainy day, she would have availed herself of her Aunt Barbara’s invitation to spend the day with her. But a rainy day at Aunt Barbara’s was not to be thought of. She took a long time to write a short letter to Mrs Seaton, in Scotland. Then she took a fit of practising her music, which, she said to herself, she had sadly neglected of late. Then she read a little. Then she went into the kitchen and superintended the making of a pudding after a new recipe which some one had given to her.
Then she dressed for dinner. But the time is very long from nine in the morning till six at night, when it is rainy without and gloomy within. It wanted full an hour of the usual time for her father’s return when she was quite ready to receive him. She wandered into the dining-room. There were no signs of the dinner-table being laid. She wandered into the drawing-room, and passed her fingers over the keys of the piano once or twice. But she could not settle to steady playing, or, indeed, to anything else.
“I wonder what has become of Master Clement all this time? It is time Martha was in the dining-room. I will go and see.”
She went into the nursery; but it was deserted. She called, but received no answer. A sound of voices from the green room drew her there, and the door opened on as merry a game as one could wish to see. Claude sat in his usual place in the arm-chair, and scattered on the carpet before him were a number of pictured and lettered blocks which his father had brought home. These Master Clement was examining with much pretended gravity. He was looking for the letter C, which Christie had pointed out to him. Whenever he made a mistake and pointed out the wrong letter, he punished himself by creeping on his hands and knees under Claude’s crib; and whenever Christie’s nod and smile proclaimed that he was right, he vaulted over the crib, with such laughter and grimaces, and such a shaking of his tangled curls over his face, that Claude laughed and clapped his hands from sympathy.
Miss Gertrude leaned over the chair and watched the play.
“How noisy you are, Clement!” she said, at last.
“Yes; but it is nice noise. I’m very good to-day, Tudie.”
“Are you? I am very glad to hear it, and very much surprised too.”
“Are you cross to-day?”