“You think that I ought not to let him come?” she asks between two panting breaths.
“I do.”
“That it would be wiser in me not to see him again?”
“Yes.”
Lavinia throws out her hands with a gesture of reckless defiance.
CHAPTER XVI
“Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother right evil for their great goodness.”
It is not long before Miss Carew has the opportunity either to put into execution or repent of the intention announced by her; for scarcely has Mrs. Darcy turned her back upon the scene of her failure, in crestfallen but quite unresentful sadness, before the successor whose coming she had deprecated is announced. Lavinia has let her friend go without any expression of apology or regret, and has watched her depressed slight back disappearing through the churchyard without one feeling but a vague sense of relief that she is out of the way.
It takes all the self-control with which the rector’s wife is so plentifully endowed, to enable her to receive, with the proper amount of concern, the news, which reaches her when scarcely within the Rectory gate, that Baden Powell has done to death two of his Mafeking chickens, by the simple process of putting his large yellow foot upon them, and keeping it there in serene unconsciousness of their departing squeaks. Her rôle is rendered easier by the fact that the children’s own grief at the catastrophe is much less than it would have been on any other day in the year, being merged in the far acuter one of their hero-playmate’s departure. There is nothing very heroic in the utterance with which their idol is answering the mute look which is the only greeting Lavinia can control herself into offering him.