Welland grasped the proffered hand. “Thank you very much,” he returned, “but I can scarcely lay claim to Mr Seaward’s friendship. The fact is, I am here in consequence of an accident to my bicycle.”
“Oh! then you are one of the poor unfortunates after all,” said the host. “Come, you are doubly welcome. Not hurt much, I hope. No? That’s all right. But don’t let me keep you from your amusements. Remember, we shall expect you at the feast on the lawn. You see, Sir Richard,” he added, turning to his dignified friend, “when we go in for this sort of thing we don’t do it by halves. To have any lasting effect, it must make a deep impression. So we have got up all sorts of amusements, as you observe, and shall have no fewer than two good feeds. Come, let us visit some other—Why, what are you gazing at so intently?”
He might well ask the question, for Sir Richard Brandon had just observed Hetty Frog, and she, unaccustomed to such marked attention, was gazing in perplexed confusion on the ground. At the same time little Di, having caught sight of her, quitted Mrs Brisbane, ran towards her with a delighted scream, and clasping her hand in both of hers, proclaimed her the sister of “my boy!”
Hetty’s was not the nature to refuse such affection. Though among the poorest of the poor, and clothed in the shabbiest and most patchy of garments, (which in her case, however, were neat, clean and well mended), she was rich in a loving disposition; so that, forgetting herself and the presence of others, she stooped and folded the little girl in her arms. And, when the soft brown hair and pale pretty face of Poverty were thus seen as it were co-mingling with the golden locks and rosy cheeks of Wealth, even Sir Richard was forced to admit to himself that it was not after all a very outrageous piece of impropriety!
“Oh! I’m so glad to hear that he’s much better, and been out too! I would have come to see him again long long ago, but p—”
She checked herself, for Mrs Screwbury had carefully explained to her that no good girl ever said anything against her parents; and little Di had swallowed the lesson, for, when not led by passion, she was extremely teachable.
“And oh!” she continued, opening her great blue lakelets to their widest state of solemnity, “you haven’t the smallest bit of notion how I have dreamt about my boy—and my policeman too! I never can get over the feeling that they might both have been killed, and if they had, you know, it would have been me that did it; only think! I would have—been—a murderer! P’raps they’d have hanged me!”
“But they weren’t killed, dear,” said Hetty, unable to restrain a smile at the awful solemnity of the child, and the terrible fate referred to.
“No—I’m so glad, but I can’t get over it,” continued Di, while those near to her stood quietly by unable to avoid overhearing, even if they had wished to do so. “And they do such strange things in my dreams,” continued Di, “you can’t think. Only last night I was in our basket-cart—the dream-one, you know, not the real one—and the dream-pony ran away again, and gave my boy such a dreadful knock that he fell flat down on his back, tumbled over two or three times, and rose up—a policeman! Not my policeman, you know, but quite another one that I had never seen before! But the very oddest thing of all was that it made me so angry that I jumped with all my might on to his breast, and when I got there it wasn’t the policeman but the pony! and it was dead—quite dead, for I had killed it, and I wasn’t sorry at all—not a bit!”
This was too much for Hetty, who burst into a laugh, and Sir Richard thought it time to go and see the games that were going on in other parts of the field, accompanied by Welland and the missionary, while Hetty returned to her special pet Lilly Snow.