“All right; but then you’ll have to do as we do, and not be a silly little French doll,” said Jack.
Gaston flushed as lively a crimson as his olive skin would permit. But though he opened his lips as though to speak, no sound was audible. His eye had met Phoena’s, and he suddenly remembered the talk they had had on the previous day. Phoena had tried, and apparently not vainly, to teach him how self-restraint was one of the chief duties imposed on a young knight.
“So now,” went on Jack, “if we teach you to play cricket, you mustn’t funk a few whacks from the ball.”
“Nor drop it like a hot potato, when you should field it,” said Phil.
“No, no, certainly not,” said Gaston, with quivering lips.
“And you’ll have to learn to climb trees like an Englishman, not like a monkey,” said Phil; “we’ll show you the difference.”
“And, besides that, you’ll have to learn heaps of other things,” interrupted Hubert, just a little disappointed that Gaston did not seem more alarmed by the programme sketched out for him; “you’ll have to—” But his eloquence was arrested by Jack, who promptly toppled him over to teach him to hold his tongue when his elders were talking.
“Very well then, come along, old chap, and we’ll make a man of you,” said Jack, and therewith the first lesson in cricket began.
On the whole, that morning’s instruction proved very successful. True, Gaston could not help hopping and dancing a little, when a specially swift ball came very close to his ears, yet he survived the ordeal without uttering a scream or shedding a tear, which was a pitch of heroism beyond anything that his companions could imagine. Indeed, Phoena was, perhaps, the only one who understood something of the little French boy’s nature, and guessed at what lay beneath his rather uninteresting exterior. But then, like Gaston, Phoena dreamt dreams she would never mention to mortal ear, and built lofty castles in the air, to which none were admitted, or suffered to guess at their existence.