She strolled languidly away, still fanning herself.
Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie were busy at the piano, inventing and composing the elevation of "Three blind mice."
Lady Locke could hear an odd little primitive sort of tune, and then their voices singing, one after the other, some words. She could only catch a few.
"Rose—white—youth,
Rose—white—youth,
Rose—white—youth,"
sang Lord Reggie's clear, but rather thin voice. Then Amarinth broke in with a deeper note, and words were lost.
Lady Locke listened for a moment. Then she suddenly turned and went out of the garden. She made her way to the paddock, and spent the rest of the morning in playing cricket with her boy and the curate's children. She caught three people out, made twenty-five runs, and began to feel quite healthy-minded and cheerful again.
X.
Choir-boys at a distance in their surplices are generally charming. Choir-boys close by in mundane suits, bought at a cheap tailor's, or sewed together at home, are not always so attractive. The cherubs' wings with which imagination has endowed them drop off, and they subside into cheeky, and sometimes scrubby, little boys, with a tendency towards peppermints, and a strong bias in favour of slang and tricks. The choir-boys of Chenecote, however, had been well-trained under Mr. Smith's ascetic eye; and though he had not drained the humanity entirely out of them, he had persuaded them to perfect cleanliness, if not to perfect godliness. They appeared at Mrs. Windsor's cottage that evening in an amazing condition of shiny rosiness, with round cheeks that seemed to focus the dying rays of the setting sun, and hair brushed perfectly flat to their little bullet-shaped heads, in which the brains worked with much excitement and anticipation. Their eyes were mostly blue and innocent, and they were all afflicted with a sort of springy shyness which led them at one moment to jumps of joy, and at another to blushes and smiling speechlessness. They were altogether naïve and invigorating, and even Madame Valtesi, peering at them through her tortoise shell eyeglass, was moved to a dry approbation. She nodded her head at them two or three times, and remarked—
"Boys are much nicer than girls. They giggle less, and smile more. In surplices these would be quite fetching—quite."