“Yes, ’m.” And Gerty, flopping down on both knees in front of the little fellow, pulled a miniature overcoat round his tiny form and stuck a sailor-hat (marked ‘Invincible’ on the ribbon) jauntily on his head—“There you are, Master Boy, dear! Ain’t you grand, eh? Going away visiting all by your own self! Quite like a big man!”
Boy smiled vaguely but sweetly, and turned one of the buttons on his coat round and round meditatively. Quite like a big man, was he? Well, he did not feel very big, but on the contrary particularly small—and especially just now, because Muzzy was standing upright, looking down upon him with a spacious air of infinite and overwhelming condescension. Surely Muzzy was a very large woman?—might not one say extra large? Boy stretched out his hand and grasped her skirt, gazing wistfully up at the bulk above him,—the bulk which now stooped, like an over-full sack of wheat toppling forward, to kiss him and bid him good-bye.
“Remember, you’ve never been away from me before, Boy,”—and ‘Muzzy’ spoke in a kind of injured tone—“so I hope you will be good and obedient, and keep your clothes clean. And when you get to Miss Leslie’s house, don’t smear your fingers on the walls, and mind you don’t break anything. You know it won’t be as it is here, where you can tumble about as you like all day and play——”
“Oh, but he can!” interposed Miss Leslie hastily—“I assure you he can!”
“Pardon me, Letitia, he can not”—and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir swelled visibly with matronly obstinacy as she spoke—“It is not likely that in your house you can have wooden soldiers all over the floor. It would be impossible. Boy has very odd ways with his soldiers. He likes to ‘camp them out’ in different spots of the pattern on the carpet—and of course it does make a place untidy. When one is a mother, one does not mind these things”—this with a superior and compassionate air—“but you, with your precise notions of order, will find it very trying.”
Miss Leslie protested, with a little smile, that really she had no particularly ‘precise’ notions of order.
“Oh yes, you have,” declared Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir emphatically—“Don’t tell me you haven’t, Letitia,—all old maids are the same. Then there is that dreadful Cow of Boy’s,—the thing Major Desmond gave him, along with the magic lantern,—he can do without the lantern, of course—but I really am afraid he had better take his Cow!”
Miss Letitia laughed—and a very pretty, musical little laugh she had.
“Oh, by all means let us have the Cow!” she said gaily. “Where is it, Boy?”
Boy looked up, then down,—to the east, to the west, and everywhere into the air, without committing himself to a reply. Gerty came to the rescue.