Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

"Oh, I don't know that," I told her; "old Mustard is well up in mathematics and mensuration——"

"What's mensuration?" She said "menthuration," and curiously enough it sounded rather nice. But if a boy had done it everybody would have laughed. Some things are all in favour of girls—others again not. Girls can't go into the army or the navy. Most boys can't, either. But they think they can for a year or two, and that does just as well. They can talk big about it till the fit goes off.

Well, I got rid of Kit Seymour. She went on to school, and as she parted from me she said: "Well, I thuppose we shall be theeing you down there by and by!"

She meant at the school—because Elsie was there. But I had something else in my mind. I was keen to find out whether Elsie had gone there because of our quarrel about Harriet Caw. The fault, of course, in any other girl, would have been Elsie's. For she would not listen to any justification—not even to the truth. But I never blamed Elsie. I only thought she had been led into it by old Betty Martin—Mr. Mustard's sister—who is so ugly that it gives you a gumboil only to look at her.

Now the school of Breckonside—Mr. Mustard's, that is—lies right up against the woods on a sloping piece of land, from which the grass has long been worn off by generations of children playing. There is another little yard with some grass at the back. That is where the girls play, and across it with its gable to the big schoolhouse is the little class-room where Elsie was teaching.

It was right bang in the woods. So I knew very well I could lie hidden along the branch of a tree and look in at the window.

Mean, you say! Not a scrap. Elsie and I had always been such friends, like brother and sister, that surely I had a right to look after her a bit. Of course, if she had known she would have let out at me—scolded I mean. But all the same she would have found it quite natural.

So I went and got hold of a ripping good place in a kind of sunk fence. Here I found, not a beech, but the trunk of an old willow that had bent itself down into the dry ditch as if feeling for the water. It was just the shape, too, and when I lay down on my face it fitted me better than my bed. There was even a rising bit at the bank for me to hook my feet round. You never saw anything so well arranged. The hazel bushes hid me from above, too, and unless you fairly stepped on me there was nothing to be seen. I had only to put aside some leafy shoots to rake the whole three windows of the little infant school.

Mean? I tell you not a bit. Why, I was really the only protector Elsie had got, and though she was mad with me just at that moment, it made no difference. Besides I had got an idea—I did not get them often, and so hung on the tighter to those I did find. And this one had really been forced upon me. It was that somehow Elsie was the key to all the mysteries, and that through her would come the solution of everything we had been trying to find out. Also—though this I would not for the life of me have mentioned to Elsie herself—that some peril hung imminent over her, and of this I should soon have proof if I wanted any.

Now it is curious how different both things and people look when you are watching them—as it were unbeknown. It is something like looking through between your legs at a landscape. You see the colours brighter, naturally, and as for the people—none of them do anything unless as if with some horrid secret purpose. When Mr. Mustard wiped his brow with a spotted handkerchief, or knocked a fly off the end of his nose, I was lost in wonderment what he meant by it. When he called Elsie to come down for her own private lessons in the big school-house, I watched carefully to see that he had not a weapon concealed under his rusty coat tails. I suppose policemen and detectives get used to this sort of thing, but certainly I never did.