Bertrand’s face hardened at once.
“That’s meant for me,” he retorted; “for me and that precious lout of a friend of yours. You think him so grand and brave! Ah well! wait a bit and see. When people don’t know their proper place they must be taught it.”
Mavis drew herself up.
“Yes,” she said, “we will wait a bit and see. But it won’t be the sort of seeing you’ll like perhaps.”
“You’ve no business to speak like that,” said Ruby. “I think you’re quite out of your mind about that common boy and his grandfather—or else—and I shouldn’t wonder if it was that, they’ve bewitched you, somehow.”
She dropped her voice with the last words, for she did not want her cousin to hear. But Miss Hortensia, though she was busily counting the rows of her knitting at the other end of the room, noticed the tone of the children’s voices.
“Come, come, my dears,” she said, “no wrangling—it would be something quite new here. I do hope,” she added to herself, “that it will be fine to-morrow; it is so much better for children when they can get out.”
It wasfine “to-morrow”; very fine. It was almost impossible for the little girls to believe that so few hours before the storm spirits had been indulging in their wild games, when they looked out of their window on to the bright clear winter sky, where scarcely a cloud was to be seen, the sun smiling down coldly but calmly; not a breath of wind moving the great fir-trees on the south side of the castle. Yet looking a little closer there were some traces of the night’s work; the ground was strewn with branches, and the last of the leaves had found their way down to their resting-place on old Mother Earth’s brown lap.
In spite of her anxieties, Mavis could not help her spirits rising.
“What a nice afternoon Ruby and I might have had with Winfried, if only Bertrand hadn’t come,” she thought.