“Who? What?” said the Vicar’s wife.
“The new one—at the cottage—I did all her furniture for her an’ got paint on my clothes an’ she told me about him not coming back ’cause of her hair p’raps an’ I got some of her things broke but not many an’ she gave me tea an’ said to come again.”
Gradually they elicited details.
“I’ll call,” said the Vicar’s wife. “It would be so nice to have someone one knows to do it—someone respectable. Fortune-tellers are so often not quite—you know what I mean, dear,” she cooed to William’s mother.
“Of course,” murmured William abstractedly “it mayn’t have been her hair. It may have been jus’ anything....”
*****
William was having a strenuous time. Fate was making one of her periodic assaults on him. Everything went wrong. Miss Drew, his form mistress at school, had taken an altogether misguided and unsympathetic view of his zeal for nature study. In fact, when the beetle which William happened to be holding lovingly in his hand as he did his sums by her desk, escaped and made its way down her neck, her piercing scream boded no good to William. The further discovery of a caterpillar and two woodlice in his pencil-box, a frog in his satchel, and earwigs in his pocket, annoyed her still more, and William stayed in school behind his friends to write out one hundred times, “I must not bring insects into school.” His addition “because they friten Miss Drew,” made relations still more strained. He met with no better luck at home. His unmelodious and penetrating practices on a mouth-organ in the early hours of the morning had given rise to a coldness that changed to actual hostility when it was discovered that he had used Ethel’s new cape as the roof of his wigwam in the garden and Robert’s new expensive brown shoe polish to transform himself to a Red Indian chief. He was distinctly unpopular at home. There was some talk of not allowing him to attend the King of Fêtes, but as the rest of the family were going and the maids had refused to be left with William on the premises it was considered safer to allow him to go.
“But any of your tricks——” said his father darkly, leaving the sentence unfinished.
The day of the King of Fêtes was fine. The stalls were bedecked in the usual bright and inharmonious colours. A few donkeys with their attendants surveyed the scene contemptuously. Ethel was wearing the new cape (brushed and cleaned to a running accompaniment of abuse of William), Mrs. Brown was presiding at a stall. Robert, wearing a large buttonhole, with his shoes well browned (with a new tin of polish purchased with William’s pocket-money) presided at a miniature rifle range. William, having been given permission to attend, and money for his entrance, hung round the gateway glaring at them scornfully. He always disliked his family intensely upon public occasions. He had not yet paid his money and was wondering whether it was worth it after all, and it would not be wiser to spend it on bulls’ eyes and gingerbreads, and his afternoon in the fields as a solitary outlaw and hunter of cats or whatever other live prey Fate chose to send him. In a tent at the farther end of the Fête ground was Miss Tabitha Croft, arrayed in a long and voluminous garment covered with strange signs. They were supposed to be mystic Eastern signs, but were in reality the invention of the Vicar’s wife, suggested by the freehand drawing of her youngest son, aged three. It completely enveloped Miss Tabitha from head to foot, leaving only two holes for her eyes and two holes for her arms. She had shown it to William the day before.
“I don’t quite like it,” she had confessed. “I hope there’s nothing—blasphemous about it. But she ought to know—being a Vicar’s wife she ought to know. I only hope,” she went on, shaking her head, “that I’m not tampering with the powers of darkness—even for the cause of the church organ.”