“Oh, ze jolly well righto yes!” said Henri.
CHAPTER III
THE SWEET LITTLE GIRL IN WHITE
The Hall stood empty most of the year, but occasionally tenants re-awoke the passing interest of the village in it. This summer it was taken by a Mr. and Mrs. Bott with their daughter. Mr. Bott’s name decorated most of the hoardings of his native country. On these hoardings citizens of England were urged to safeguard their digestion by taking Bott’s Sauce with their meat. After reading Bott’s advertisements one felt convinced that any food without Bott’s Sauce was rank poison. One even felt that it would be safer to live on Bott’s Sauce alone. On such feelings had Mr. Bott—as rubicund and rotund as one of his own bottles of sauce—reared a fortune sufficient to enable him to take the Hall for the summer without, as the saying is, turning a hair.
William happened to be sitting on the fence by the side of the road when the motor containing Mr. and Mrs. Bott—both stout and overdressed—and Miss Violet Elizabeth Bott and Miss Violet Elizabeth Bott’s nurse flashed by. William was not interested. He was at the moment engaged in whittling a stick and watching the antics of his mongrel, Jumble, as he caught and worried each shaving. But he had a glimpse of a small child with an elaborately curled head and an elaborately flounced white dress sitting by an elaborately uniformed nurse. He gazed after the equipage scowling.
“Huh!” he said, and it is impossible to convey in print the scorn of that monosyllable as uttered by William, “a girl!”
Then he returned to his whittling.
******
William’s mother met Mrs. Bott at the Vicar’s. Mrs. Bott, who always found strangers more sympathetic than people who knew her well, confided her troubles to Mrs. Brown. Her troubles included her own rheumatism, Mr. Bott’s liver, and the carelessness of Violet Elizabeth’s nurse.
“Always reading these here novelettes, the girl is. I hope you’ll come and see me, dear, and didn’t some one say you had a little boy? Do bring him. I want Violet Elizabeth to get to know some nice little children.”