CHAPTER XIX.

“THEY HAVE NOT GONE YET.”

“There, I must say, Libbie,” remarked Mrs. Busson, as she busied herself with her Saturday’s tidying of store-room and linen-press, “we do seem to have had a nice, quiet week since last Sunday. One may say of those dear children that if they came in like lions, they’ll go out like lambs.”

“They haven’t gone yet, ma’am,” said Libbie, in a decided, though deferential tone, and she sighed somewhat significantly.

Libbie felt that she had paid rather heavily towards maintaining that week of peace.

Diana had taken to making cheese instead of mischief, and to stirring up jams instead of strife, and Libbie’s patience had not been a little taxed by the mis-placed zeal Di had displayed in both these pursuits; indeed, more than once Libbie had come near to losing her temper altogether, Di having achieved the loss already of much of her toil and time. Still it was certainly a fact beyond dispute, as Fay and Phoena agreed, that when Di was happily occupied and Andrew was invalided, matters went much more smoothly.

Andrew took a full week to recover from his sharp attack of asthma. On the whole he enjoyed that week very much, for not only were the girls his willing slaves, but the boys did their share as well in helping to amuse him. Although they generally hated the sight of dominoes, and voted a game of chess worse than vulgar fractions, yet whenever they came indoors they rushed up to Andrew’s room to offer to have a game with him, and they never once called him “Miss Annie.”

Even Gaston--though he never felt safe near the once savage ogre--actually brought his best-loved French picture books, and, depositing them on the chair nearest to Andrew’s door, fled back down the passage as though wolves were pursuing him.

“It’s a pity that he’s such a frightened little frog,” said Hubert.

To Marygold’s grief Hubert had taken to copying his elder brother’s contempt for Gaston.

“I wouldn’t like to be such a silly,” he added.

“It’s a great pity that you don’t try in a kind way to make him braver,” said Fay, severely. “Yesterday, for instance, when he was so afraid of being struck by the cricket ball, instead of telling him that it would be sure to break his legs, it would have been much kind----”

“Preachey, preachey,” broke in Hubert, so rudely that Phil, who joined the party at that moment, promptly fell on him.

“Look here, you’re getting too cheeky,” he declared, with a warning shake: “we shall have to court-martial you. How dare you speak like that to Fay? How dare you, you young monkey?”

“I dare what I choose,” retorted the young culprit, defiantly.

Hubert’s fearlessness in the face of chastisement always appealed powerfully to his big brothers’ admiration, so that however much they might threaten him with a “jolly good licking,” neither Jack nor Phil would ever have carried out their threat on the small boy, whose pluck was their favourite boast at school.

“You may beat me to death if you like,” Hubert proceeded to observe.

“What’s up now?” enquired Jack, who came to see what was going on.

Faith rehearsed what had taken place.

“Well, I must say Gaston _is_ an awful little muff,” said Jack; “still I suppose we’ve got to be kind to him, so look here, Hubert. First of all, go and tell Faith that you’re sorry for having been rude to her.”

“I’m sorry I was rude to you, Faith,” said Hubert, with the grandly condescending air of a royal penitent, “but I was quite right all----”

“Chain up,” broke in Phil, “you weren’t asked to furnish any additional remarks about yourself. Now go on, Jack, with what you were saying.”

“And then you must finish your penance,” continued Jack, “by fetching Gaston, and we’ll give him a lesson in cricket.”

“And you’d better not try to frighten him over it, do you hear?” said Phil.

“I’d much raver be licked than have to play,” began Hubert.

“But small boys can’t always get what they want, even when it is a licking,” said Jack. “Now, off you go, or you shall have the frog and a whacking too.”

“It really would be kind,” said Fay, “to try to teach Gaston in a gentle way to be a little more like an English boy.”

“We can try, but I don’t think that we shall ever succeed,” said Phil.

“So you’ve brought him,” cried Jack, as, a few minutes later, Hubert came back with Gaston, whose eyes looked red with crying. “Now, look here, Gaston, do you or don’t you want to belong to us?”

“But I do, I do,” said the boy, eagerly.

“All right; but then you’ll have to do as we do, and not be a silly little French doll,” said Jack.

Gaston flushed as lively a crimson as his olive skin would permit. But though he opened his lips as though to speak, no sound was audible. His eye had met Phoena’s, and he suddenly remembered the talk they had had on the previous day. Phoena had tried, and apparently not vainly, to teach him how self-restraint was one of the chief duties imposed on a young knight.

“So now,” went on Jack, “if we teach you to play cricket, you mustn’t funk a few whacks from the ball.”

“Nor drop it like a hot potato, when you should field it,” said Phil.

“No, no, certainly not,” said Gaston, with quivering lips.

“And you’ll have to learn to climb trees like an Englishman, not like a monkey,” said Phil; “we’ll show you the difference.”

“And, besides that, you’ll have to learn heaps of other things,” interrupted Hubert, just a little disappointed that Gaston did not seem more alarmed by the programme sketched out for him; “you’ll have to--” But his eloquence was arrested by Jack, who promptly toppled him over to teach him to hold his tongue when his elders were talking.

“Very well then, come along, old chap, and we’ll make a man of you,” said Jack, and therewith the first lesson in cricket began.

On the whole, that morning’s instruction proved very successful. True, Gaston could not help hopping and dancing a little, when a specially swift ball came very close to his ears, yet he survived the ordeal without uttering a scream or shedding a tear, which was a pitch of heroism beyond anything that his companions could imagine. Indeed, Phoena was, perhaps, the only one who understood something of the little French boy’s nature, and guessed at what lay beneath his rather uninteresting exterior. But then, like Gaston, Phoena dreamt dreams she would never mention to mortal ear, and built lofty castles in the air, to which none were admitted, or suffered to guess at their existence.