“To be sure; what is her name?” cried Nelly promptly.
Mrs. Eastwood went back into the recesses of her memory. She knew it was a great family name in the branch of the Vanes to which her brother-in-law belonged. It was something very unlike him; that she remembered: very much unlike him; for she recollected quite well thinking so when she heard it first. Not Angel; oh, no, though that was pretty, and quite the reverse of the father. No. Now she recollected. Innocent—that was the name.
“Innocent!” they all said, repeating it one after another all round the table. It impressed the family somehow, and made Mrs. Eastwood—I cannot tell you exactly for what reason—cry a little. There was something that went to her kind heart in the name.
And two days after Frederick started for the Continent, to bring the orphan home.
CHAPTER III.
THE FAMILY.
A bright spring morning, sharp and cold, but with floods of sunshine everywhere—sunshine on the grass, turning the delicate rime into a network of pearls, and glittering along all the bare branches, where the brown buds were beginning to swell—colder than autumn, almost colder than winter, but with a different sentiment in the air. Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him—better days are coming; the trees felt this already, though their buds were pinched, and Nelly felt it as she went out with her garden gloves on, and a pair of scissors. What did she expect to find in the garden, do you ask? Nothing in the garden, where the crocuses had scarcely awakened to the fact that the sun was up and calling them; but away at the end of the lawn, among the roots of that transept of lime trees which crossed the avenue of big elms, there were hosts of hardy little snowdrops peeping up among the half-frozen grass, and growing in handfuls as Nature bade them. By what sweet piece of good fortune this came to be, I cannot tell; but so it was. Nelly herself, in a jacket trimmed with white fur, was too bright to be like her snowdrops. She ran up and down the long avenue to warm her delicate little toes. It was a better way than sitting over the fire. In the little open space before the garden door, Dick, with a book in his coat pocket, was doing what he could to inform the mind of Winks. Dick was supposed to get up at seven to improve his own mind, and, I presume, he believed that the book in his pocket did him some good by mere contact, if nothing else. He had read, at most, one page of it, at the expense of I don’t know how many yawns, but now his soul was set on the more congenial task of teaching Winks to carry a musket and stand on guard. Winks looked at the stick which had fallen from his unwilling paws, sniffing at it with a certain cynical disbelief in the supposed weapon. He was a very dark-coloured Skye, almost black, and had a way of grinning at Dick with all his white teeth displayed from his black lips, in a satirical smile which incensed his instructor greatly. Winks had as great objections to being instructed as Dick had himself, but, being above those prudential reasons which induced his young master to smother his feelings, the four-footed neophyte had distinctly the advantage. He did not believe in the feigned firearm, and words could not have expressed the good-humoured disdain with which he wagged his tail. “You think this is a gun, I suppose,” Winks’s tail said; “but I who am your intellectual superior am not to be taken in. Take up that bit of wood in my paws as if I was a mountebank! Not if I know it.” “Sit up, sir, sit up,” said Dick in a passion. Winks only smiled the more and wagged his tail. But the lesson, though it amused his cynical humour, began to bore him. All at once he put his head on one side, and pricked up his ears, responding to some imaginary call. The pantomime was far cleverer than anything Dick was capable of. “I think I hear my mistress calling me,” Winks said in the plainest English; but he was too clever to escape at once. He paused, contemplative, consulting heaven and earth. “Did I hear my mistress call?” Then suddenly once more came the imaginary summons. “Distressed I am sure, beyond all measure, to leave you,” the polite dog said, with a final wag of his tail, triumphant, yet deprecating. “Confound the little brute!” cried Dick, indignant; and Winks chuckled as he ran off on three legs, pretending to be all eagerness. “Confound the little beast!” repeated the boy; “Nelly, come here, and don’t dance about in that aggravating way;—just when I thought he had got hold of a new trick!”
“Winks is a great deal too clever to do tricks,” said Nelly.
“Yes, he is as knowing as I am,” said innocent Dick. “I wonder now if there is any truth in that stuff about transmigration. He must have been an actor, that brute. I don’t believe my mother called a bit. I don’t believe she is down-stairs yet—cunning little beast! What a jolly lot of snowdrops, Nelly! Are you going in? It’s not nine yet. Come round the walk, I want to speak to you. Oh what an awful bore is this exam.!” said Dick, with a deep sigh. “Now I put it to you, Nell, in the spirit of fairness, how can a fellow be expected to do mathematics before breakfast? It is bad enough when you have been worked up to it, and supported; but at eight o’clock in the morning, without so much as a cup of coffee! What are men supposed to be made of? I am sure it never was so in the old times.”
“Much you know about it,” said Nelly. “When I was at school, and much younger than you, I had to get up and practise for an hour and a half before breakfast—cold fingers and cold keys—and not even a fire.”
“Oh, as for that,” said Dick, “of course I never minded getting up at Eton; all the other fellows did it, and for one thing, the masters were punished just as much as we were, and looked just as blue. But when you are all of you in your comfortable beds, and only me at work!”