“Well, p’raps you are. Begin that sentence again. ‘The S A X,’ you must know what ‘Sax’ is.”
Jasper gazed at the letters. He was not a quick child, though “stupid” was not by any means a true description of him, for where any service to others, or his power to help them, was in question, his gift of finding it out was almost like a fairy one.
“But there’s more than ‘S A X’,” he objected. “I know what ‘Saxon’ is,” and he pronounced it correctly, “why am I to say only ‘Sax’?”
Christabel groaned.
“Oh, you donkey!” she exclaimed. “I was dividing it into syllables to make it easier for you, of course. If you knew what the whole word was, why did you sit staring at it as if you didn’t?”
“I only wanted to be quite certin,” he said humbly, and then they started again, and again came to a standstill, for Christabel’s sharpness seemed to stupefy the little fellow; and when Mrs Fortescue, half-an-hour or so after the lessons had begun, looked in to see how teacher and pupil were getting on, she was disappointed to gather, by the traces of tears in Jasper’s eyes and by Chrissie’s flaming cheeks, that things were not going any too smoothly.
“Oh Mummy, he is so stupid!” exclaimed the little governess. “Oh, I do hope I shall never have—”
But a stifled sob from Jasper made his mother interrupt Chrissie’s “hopes,” the nature of which it was not difficult to guess.
“Jasper, dear,” she said, and there was perhaps a tiny shadow of reproach in her tone.
“I has tried, Mumsey, Mumsey, teruly I has,” and then his voice broke.