“No, he had better not come,” they agreed.
“So hop off, Master Frog, till further orders,” jeered Andrew.
“Never mind, Gaston, you’ll go with them next time,” comforted Faith. But Gaston, seeing all the boys disappear without him, and thus realising that, in spite of their promise, he was to be excluded from their games, was deaf to consolation.
He stood motionless, like a small monument of stony grief, his sorrowful eyes fixed on the opening in the thick bushes through which the others had vanished.
“Never mind, dear little Gaston,” said Phoena, kindly, running up to him and putting her hand on his arm, “you shall be my own knight, and we will do something grand between us.”
“You are good,” he said, slowly, but so mournfully that even Di’s heart was touched, “but it is not just; no, no, it is not just.”
Then he turned, and, with almost a majestic step, he walked out of the wood. A minute later he might have been seen executing a kind of war-dance on the top of the steep bank which separated the wood from the fields, and muttering in his mother tongue words to this effect:
“Ha! I am a French frog indeed! Yes, yes, a frog! Ah! it is well; they shall see, they shall see.”
Fay, meanwhile, and the other girls were speculating rather anxiously as to what might be the outcome of the boys’ conclave.
“I do hope they’re not going to do anything very dreadful,” said Fay, “but the boys are so foolhardy.”