'Well?' said Clement again. 'What? I don't see that there's much to be down in the mouth about.'
'It's just that—I feel rather a fool,' I said. 'Anybody would laugh so at the whole affair if they heard it. I daresay Blanche will think I've no more sense than Pete. She has a horrid superior way sometimes, you know.'
'You needn't bother about that, either,' said he. 'She and Elf have got their heads perfectly full of Margaret. I don't suppose Blanche will ever speak of your part of it, or think of it even. As long as papa and mamma are all right—and I'm sure they are—you may count it a case of all's well that ends well.'
I did begin to feel rather cheered up.
'You're sure I'm not going to get a talking to, after all?' I said, still doubtfully. 'I saw mamma looking at me rather funnily in the train.'
'Did you, my boy?' said another voice, and glancing round, I saw mamma, who had come into the room so quietly that neither of us had heard her.
She sat down beside us. And then it was that she explained to me what I had done wrong, and been foolish about. I have already told what she said, and I felt that it was all true and sensible. And she was so kind—not laughing at me a bit, even for having a little believed about the witch and all that—that I lost the horrid, mortified, ashamed feelings I had been having.
Just then the nursery tea-bell rang. I got up—slowly—I still felt a little funny and uncomfortable about Blanche, and even nurse. You see nurse made such a pet of Peterkin that she never scarcely could see that he should be found fault with, and of course he was a very good little chap, though not exactly an angel without wings—and certainly rather a queer child, with all his fairy-tale fancies.
But mamma put her hand on my arm.
'No,' she said. 'Clem and you are going to have tea in the drawing-room with me. The nursery party will be better left to itself to-day, and little Margaret is not accustomed to so many.'