Before his Grace could reply Joan wrenched herself free from her mother’s restraining hand and flew up to the group.
“Oh, please don’t do anything to William,” she pleaded. “It was my fault, too—I’m not a real one, but I’m an ally—till death do us part, you know.”
His Grace looked from one to the other. He had been bored almost to tears by the vicar’s wife and the committee. With a lightening of the heart he recognised more entertaining company.
“Well,” he said judicially, “come to the refreshment tent and we’ll talk it over, over an ice.”
*****
The news that his Grace had spent almost the entire afternoon eating ices with William Brown and those other children, discussing pirates and Red Indians, and telling them stories of big game hunting, made the village gasp.
The further knowledge that he had asked them to walk down to the station with him, had called at Moss’, tasted cokernut lumps, pronounced them delicious, bought a pound for each of them, and ordered a monthly supply, left the village almost paralysed. But everyone went to Mr. Moss’ to ask for details. Mr. Moss was known as the confectioner who supplied the Duke of Ashbridge with cokernut lumps. Mallards’ shop was let to a baker’s the next month, and the red-haired girl said that she wasn’t sorry—of all the dead-and-alive holes to work in this place was the deadest.
It was Miss Spence who voiced the prevailing sentiment about William. She did not say it out of affection for William. She had no affection for William.
William chased her cat and her hens, disturbed her rest with his unearthly songs and whistles, broke her windows with his cricket ball, and threw stones over the hedge into her garden pond.
But one day, as she watched William progress along the ditch—William never walked on the road if he could walk in the ditch—dragging his toes in the mud, his hands in his pockets, his head poking forward, his brows frowning, his freckled face stern and determined, his mouth pucked up to make his devastating whistle, his train of boy followers behind him, she said slowly: “There’s something about that boy——”