'But, Betty dear, what about washing the china?'
And Betty would start off at once on a new set of arrangements to fit in everything.
Or she would burst into the kitchen with another idea, while Angelica was ordering the dinner.
'Angel dear, don't you think it would be very healthy for Godfrey to live entirely on vegetables? In that paper Cousin Crayshaw brought down it said it was such a capital thing for children. He might begin on potatoes to-day, and to-morrow he might have vegetable marrow, and we might draw up a list for every day in the week.'
It was all rather distracting to Angel, who felt quite sure that Betty was much cleverer than she was, and yet dreaded trying any experiment with Godfrey which she did not quite understand. It was Betty's idea that Godfrey should spend Sunday afternoon in learning his Catechism; all children learnt their Catechism on a Sunday, she said, and the sooner Godfrey began the better. Besides, once a month the children were catechized in church, and she didn't want him to be behind Nancy Rogers and Jerry Ware, and all the village boys and girls. So he said the answers after her and she explained them, which she certainly did very brightly and very well, and on week-days Angel taught him the earlier ones, in her gentle, plodding way, till he knew them by heart. He had done what his Aunt Betty required of him by the time Angel had taken two more turns, and was having his reward in the story which he called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite of all Betty's tales, and it was the sort she liked best to tell, with a little bit of fact and a great deal of imagining. Certainly there was not very much fact to begin upon, only an old tradition of one of William the Conqueror's barons, who had long ago owned land at Oakfield and had planted the tree which gave the place its name. What chiefly interested Godfrey was that the baron of the oak had borne the same Christian name as himself, though nobody knew his surname.
'Was that why they called me that?' he asked eagerly, the first time Betty told him the story.
Betty could not say for certain, but she and Angel had fancied that Godfrey's father, who had been at Oakfield often when he was a little boy, might have been thinking of his English home when he chose the name, for he had no relation called Godfrey. At any rate Betty and her nephew decided that it must have been so, and when Godfrey came to godparents in the Catechism and did not know who his own had been, he christened the great Norman baron 'godpapa,' and loved to sit at Betty's feet with his chin on her knee, looking up with his wide grey eyes into hers, while she told how well the gallant Sir Godfrey had fought at Hastings, and how the king had given him the wide stretch of fair pasture and forest as a reward for his valour, and how perhaps the acorn was the very first thing he planted, and how his wife liked to come out on a summer evening and mark how it grew into a young tree, and how his grandchildren and great-grandchildren played under its shadow.
'And did he sit under it when it was a big tree?' asked Godfrey in his earnest way.
'Well, no, I don't think he could have himself, because, you see, by that time he must have been dead and buried in the church—very likely close by Miss Jane, with his figure all in armour on the top, and a little dog at his feet.'
'No, but I would rather have him sitting under the oak,' persisted Godfrey; 'make it a different end, Auntie Betty,' and as Angelica came round the end of the yew hedge, he ran to meet her, exclaiming,