Geoffry jumped down into the little white pit as he spoke, as if to demonstrate his remark. Patricia looked scornful.
“So long as your are restless, you mean,” she said.
“Well, you must teach me better if you can. I say, Patricia, do you always turn reproof on the reprover’s head?”
He leant against the bank looking up at her, smiling in his easy, good-tempered way. He wished vaguely the line of frown on her pretty forehead would go. He wondered if she had a headache.
He ventured to put his hand over hers when he was sure Christopher was not looking. She neither answered the caress nor resented it.
Presently he began to explore the hollow, poking into all the rabbit-holes with his stick.
Christopher sat silent, which was a mistake, for it 272 left her irritation but one object on which to expend itself, and after all it was Geoffry who should have tried to please her by sitting still.
Suddenly a frightened rabbit burst out of a disturbed hole, and Geoffry, with a shout of delight, in pure instinct flung a stone. By a strange, unhappy fluke, expected least of all by himself, the stone hit the poor little terrified thing and it rolled over dead. He picked it up by its ears and called to them triumphantly to witness his luck, with boyish delight in the unexpected, though the chances were he would never have flung the stone at all had he dreamt of destroying it.
A second flint whizzed through the air, grazing the side of his head. He dropped the rabbit and stood staring blankly at the two on the bank.
Patricia’s white, furious face blazed on him. Christopher was grasping her hands, his face hardly less white.