Daphne Bruno

PART I: Les Tracas des Enfants

CHAPTER I

Daphne's earliest memories were of being awake in her cot while the daylight was still outside the blinds, though flushed with sunset. Downstairs were footsteps and closing doors and women's voices; and sometimes her father's voice, only this was so deep as to be but half heard. In another and smaller cot slept Owen, her baby brother, who often woke and cried for a minute and dropped off to sleep again. He frightened her a little when, after dark, he would suddenly climb through a crescendo from whimpering to crying, and crying to screaming; and she would be glad when Hollins came up and quieted him with a fruity and ingratiating, "Now, go to by-by like a good little boy," or picked him up and sang to him:

Sonny go round the sun,
Sonny go round the moon,
Sonny go round the mulberry bush,
On a Sunday afternoon——

though Daphne was always faintly worried by this equating of a mulberry bush with the sun and moon. If Miss Durgon came up instead, she was much more prosaic. She put Owen firmly on his other side, and added as she went out, to Daphne, who was sitting up, big-eyed, to watch the rearrangement of Owen:

"Now you go to sleep. We don't want nonsense from you too."

With the passing of time Daphne learnt that there were three stable people in her world: Hollins, round, and in a blue cotton uniform, chiefly associated with comfort and friendliness; Miss Durgon, long, black, and chiefly associated with correction, church and manners; and her father, with a pointed beard. She conceived that fathers and beards went together, and was much surprised the first time she saw some one else's father who had not even a moustache. How he could be old enough to be a father was not clear.

Her father was a jolly person in the early morning before breakfast. At half-past seven she was allowed to go into his bedroom and to climb on to the eiderdown for the playing of a game called "When I say 'kipper.'" It consisted in Daphne's inventing a long story to which her father must listen carefully, because directly she worked in the dangerous word "kipper" he was to tickle her violently. Her shrieks of alarm, after uttering the word "kipper," always began before the tickling got really started, and her yells of laughter and screams for mercy generally rewarded Mr. Bruno's tickling campaign within thirty seconds of its inception. When Owen was old enough to play this game it was doubly exciting; for sometimes he would work in the dangerous word, and she, unprepared for it so soon, was caught and tickled till she rolled, screaming with hysterical laughter, off the bed to the floor.

Some mornings she woke very early, and knew she would not go to sleep again, because it was daylight; and then her games had to be silent, for it was an offence to wake Owen; so she would use her knee or her foot to lift the bedclothes into a tent and sprawl about under them, divided in her mind whether they formed an Indian's wigwam or a Commander-in-Chief's headquarters. Wearying of this, she would lie on her back and with her knees form the white quilt into a range of mountains. There were Alpine pathways up the folds, and if she half-closed her eyes she could see the St. Bernard dogs and the pious monks as they looked for dead men in the snowdrifts.

Hollins was a good person when she told them tales, but her nursery rhymes struck Daphne from the first as rather silly. Cows couldn't jump over moons, nor dishes run away with spoons. And "Old Mother Hubbard," which told of an old woman going to the larder to get a bone for her dog and finding the place empty: vaguely Daphne felt that as a story it led to nothing, and certainly wasn't worth making a song about. Nor could she see that little Jack Horner's remark, "What a good boy am I!" had any sense or sequence. Though in courtesy she applauded Hollins for her frequent rendering of these poems, she felt uncomfortably that the pleasant old servant was sinking in her estimation by uttering such nonsense. Her father agreed that Jack Horner's exclamation was a non-sequitur, and told her that she had a quite exceptional clarity of brain, which would be a curse to her through life. And then he added: "How's this for a nursery rhyme, Duffy?" and recited gently:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three-score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye. There and back again.

"That's not far from beauty, Duffy, as I hope you'll be able to see one day."

And somehow it did sound different. Its measured movement pleased her, and its blue sadness; and these made her feel solemn and dreamy.

Fairy tales weren't nonsense, because they were admittedly stories of people in an imaginary world, and so could be completely, engrossingly satisfying. They were her monopolising delight when she could read—at least, Grimm's were. Grimm's she read again and again, lolling in a deep arm-chair with her heels beneath her, and the book on the chair's arm. Grimm's stories were real stories, clear and exciting. Hans Andersen's were different: she could not get hold of them, and they were rather terrible. Yet after she had abandoned the annoying book they haunted her strangely: "The Girl who Trod on the Loaf"—ugly, dark, wonderful story; "The Red Shoes," "Ib and little Christina," and "Something." Whole sentences from them hung in her memory: "She flew away, as if she were flying straight into the sun." "They said 'Clink' and were broken." "And that was something."

"You don't understand, Duffy," said Mr. Tenter Bruno, when the annoyingness of Hans Andersen was pointed out to him. "But while Grimm only entertains you with what is agreeable, Hans Andersen troubles you with beauty."

When, in Hollins's phrase, she was "rising nine," her father decided to move to town. Earning a much larger income now, he could have lived in considerable style, but for the ever-gnawing fear that either his brain-power or his vogue would dwindle, and the workhouse ensue. This made him resolve that his place in town should not be in one of the expensive districts. But it would have to be fairly big, if it were to accommodate the two children, Miss Durgon, Hollins, and another servant.

Such a house was found at last in Deseret Road, West Kensington. The sanguine Mr. Bruno was quite pleased with it: a tall, red-brick place, with basement and area and four stories above—the sort of place which would both make him very comfortable and allow itself to be called a suburban barbarity. The back of the house looked over the grounds of Queen's Club, so that one could watch the Varsity sports and football matches from all the windows that were above the grounds' encircling trees. Opposite the house front, across a good road, was a sunken waste ground waiting for the builder to arrive upon it. In the neighbourhood were many such places, though the long screens of uniform houses were building apace.

So there joined Daphne's more vivid memories the picture of that exciting day when they journeyed up to London and their new house. To her, who had only been told of London, it was a move as exciting as the departure of town children for the sea; the packing in the previous week, the trunks standing in the hall the night before, the arrival of the "fly" from the Ballard Arms, the stacking of the trunks about the carriage, and the drive, thus laden, to the station. Hollins and the maid had gone ahead to prepare the house, so Daphne and Owen secured one pair of corner seats in the railway carriage, and their father and Miss Durgon the other. More people got in, which meant extinction for Owen, Miss Durgon telling him he must keep his seat and not fidget. Daphne, having been wakeful most of the night, was lulled to sleep by the passing of the hedgerows and palings, and by the slow rolling and swinging of the train, till the voices of the strange occupants, and of her father and Miss Durgon, floated in a luminous mist behind her half sleep.

She was awakened by a jolting and slowing of the train and the movements of the people in the compartment. The November day had darkened, and out of her window she saw more interlacing railway lines than she could have believed possible, all of them wet, as if rain had fallen here, and shining in gaslight. The backs of the houses were dark-grey and gloomy, and the few lit windows frightened her with their suggestiveness. Unconsciously she created stories of misery for the people behind them. The train rolled into the colossal station that bruised and battered her with its noises and smell and hurrying.

"We must get a four-wheeler," said her father importantly.

She wondered what a four-wheeler was, till the porter trundled their luggage alongside a "fly" much more squat than the carriage sent by the Ballard Arms. There was a head-achy smell inside it, and she was glad when her father sat her on his knee, for she received a draught from the window, as well as being able to see the things coming into view. First, there were lighted shops and entangling traffic; then a broad, roomy road of tall houses; then a great highway that seemed all coloured buses and four-wheelers and jingling hansoms. These hansoms, she said, were like sedan chairs drawn by horses. All of it kept her commenting and questioning, till of a sudden she was given a fear—one of those fears that one did not tell to adults for they were not liable to them. There was a man running beside their cab. A man in a cloth cap, with a muffler round his neck. In and out of the pedestrians he padded, sometimes on the roadway, sometimes on the pavement, often glancing at the luggage stacked on the cab's roof. The scenery changed, but the padding man was as unlosable as a shadow. She drew back her face from the window.

They were bowling now down a wide road, on one side of which were rows of tall houses, painted white or cream, or left a cindery grey, and on the other an interminable line of railings with trees and grass beyond. Daphne could only judge that a garden so endless must be the Queen's and she inquired of her father:

"Is that where the Queen lives, daddy?"

"Yes; she used to live there, or a little farther on—in fact, she was born there, but, like us, she's moved."

"And who lives there now, then?"

Mr. Bruno controlled a smile.

"Oh, the Prince Consort has a seat there."

"Who's the Prince Consort?" She thought foggily of Grimm's princes.

"Well, he's a howling swell in his place in there," assured her father.

Daphne said no more, for, in staring out, she had seen the shadow-man still keeping level with the cab. They had passed into a neighbourhood that, though it had some tall, red-brick houses, was subtly inferior to anything they had come through before. Miss Durgon made the remark: "Dear me, this is all very familiar ground," and Daphne, while envying her this knowledge, thought that somehow the neighbourhood suited Miss Durgon. What she meant she could not have said: probably that it was a dark and well-behaved neighbourhood, a genteel hanger-on of the fine white houses, and a place that would prohibit the noisier games.

Now the cab left the streets where the buses were, and got into quiet roads of residential houses. It seemed to turn round every corner that Daphne gambled it would turn round. And always the running man turned with it. It stopped at last before a high house, one of a red-brick row, with many white steps leading up to its front door. There was a lamp-post opposite the area gate, and she could see by its light that the dark-green paint on the hall door was raised into little blisters. Interesting things to prick.

The cab-door opened by itself—or, rather, it was opened by the shadow, who touched his cloth cap. Daphne, whom her father was about to hand out, shrunk back as if she were being handed to some dark, night messenger.

"It's all right," laughed her father. "This gentleman has only come to help us with our luggage."

That moment the hall door of their new home opened, flooding the steps with gas-light; and Daphne, seeing Hollins standing there, rushed hurriedly past the shadow into her arms.

Because of its complete difference from their Sussex home, the house in Deseret Road appealed to Daphne as a place much more romantic and thrilling—especially on foggy falls of their first November, when it could assume an air of the sinister. She and Owen early examined, not without fears, its every room and cupboard and cellar. Owen at first had not seen much reason to be afraid of them—nor, in truth, had Daphne—but, in order to make them more interesting, she had deliberately worked on his imagination and her own with rather disturbing ideas about secret panels and subterranean passages, till Owen was obviously terrified of them, and she herself wondered what exactly her feelings about them were. To explore at night the kitchen and pantries, which were actually below ground and down a stairway like a mine-shaft, was a thrilling adventure when prosecuted with a companion—unthinkable alone.

The long dining-room was a dangerous place because of the huge syphon for making soda-water that stood in the centre of the sideboard, before the mirror. This great bulbous, though neat-waisted glass thing, encased in a trellis-work of wire, was as large as a child, and Hollins had told them that the wire casing was to prevent it exploding.

"Dangerous things," she had said. "They have to be all wrapped up in wire like that, being apt to go sort of what I call—off."

So Daphne, in the first weeks, always went past the sideboard quickly; and she marvelled, with hand at her mouth, when her father lifted the thing carelessly, and even shook it.

The sounds outside the house, too, were so different from those around their Sussex home. There the birds had sung, hardly heeded, in the boughs or under the eaves, or fluttered out of the creeper on the walls; and footsteps were seldom heard unless they were those of Eadigo on the gravel, or some visitor approaching the door. But here in Deseret Road sounded the rattle of two-wheeled tradesmen's carts, almost under the breakfast-room window; the crunching of errand-boys' hand-barrows; the ringing on the pavement of the feet of passers-by; or a loud and continued vibrating as some idle, whistling urchin dragged a stick along the area railings. In the winter came the bell of the muffin-man; and at other times the musical, sad cry of men and women selling lavender:

Lavender, sweet lavender,
Sixteen branches a penny

The errand boys were interesting because they could often be encouraged to put out their tongues or make long noses. And the muffin-man was never to be missed; if Daphne announced his appearance, Owen rushed to the breakfast-room window. He balanced a whole tray of muffins on his head, with nothing of the contortion, nervousness and reaching of one's tongue up to one's nose that Daphne had found inevitable when trying to do it with the butler's tray.

Ever afterwords the muffin bell made her think of a winter Sunday afternoon in Deseret Road. A year had passed. Father was away—tremendously far away. Having decided to treat himself to a holiday in India, he had departed in a cloud of romance, after showing the children his cabin trunks, his tropical hats, and pictures of the huge ship in which he would actually live for several weeks. Once he had "dressed up" in his Indian toggery, and beautifully neat and handsome, distinguished and whimsical he had looked in his white drill, smiling above his brown beard. Father's absence brought one advantage: Hollins, instead of Miss Durgon, took them to church. When father was at home, Miss Durgon had always conducted them with great parade to St. Antony's near by. It was a long, unintelligible service, and Daphne's only interest was to hope that some one would faint again, like a young woman who had caused a splendid diversion one warm spring morning. But nobody ever obliged again, and Daphne's detestation of church was suddenly increased to horror by the fixed idea that one day she was destined to provide the excitement. This heart-stopping thought would come over her, if the sermon were at all long, so that she would send up an ejaculatory prayer as sincere as that house of prayer had ever known: "O God, make him stop!" Miss Durgon's deportment at church incensed her more than anywhere else; it was so silly the way she opened her Bible, directly the preacher announced the text and its reference. What was the sense in looking them up when she had just been told what they were? Guessing that her father did not approve of church, she one day announced to Miss Durgon that she didn't think she would go that morning; Father didn't go. But Miss Durgon made short work of this: "Your father's a very clever man. When you're as clever as he is, you'll be able to question whether or not you'll go to church"; to which Daphne answered promptly: "Father says I am clever."

But now that Mr. Bruno had gone away, Miss Durgon ceased going to church, delegating to Hollins the task of taking the children. And going to Hollins's church was nothing like so detestable as going to Miss Durgon's. Hollins had a church of her own fancy, quite a distance away, to which you went in a bus.

"I do seem to fancy it, I must say," she told the children. "I can't explain it—it sort of gets me. Your St. Antony's doesn't get me at all."

She had first taken them there in the morning, telling them they would be pleased with the procession; it was as good as a theatre. This had excited them, and in their pew they eagerly awaited the beginning of the entertainment. When the banners and crucifixes and candles and incense and scarlet-skirted boys and quilted clergymen poured out from behind the high altar, Owen, who had been watching them with a falling mouth, suddenly looked up to Hollins and said:

"Is it all right?"

Hollins murmured "Sh—sh," and nodded "Yes," thereby answering the question that England had essayed to answer for sixty years.

On this particular winter afternoon, the children's service was more than usually entertaining. Glossy coloured pictures were brought round by the stout, smiling gentleman in the linen and lace, and distributed to the children. It was better than the crackers thrown by the clown in the pantomime, for every child seemed (if craning heads saw aright) to receive one, and the stout gentleman had almost as merry a smile as the clown's. When he came alongside Owen, who was at the end of the pew—in fact, almost in the nave, such was his open-mouthed interest—and offered him a picture, Owen looked up at Hollins and asked:

"Is it all right?"

And Hollins said:

"Yes. Sh——! Quite all right. Take it."

So he took it and began to chew one of its corners. Daphne had some difficulty in taking hers for she was struggling with a fit of giggling.

Towards the end of the service, when the church was darkening, another exciting and mirthful thing happened: the verger lit the gas-brackets one after another. Then came a hymn, "All things bright and beautiful," and a procession in which the children fell in, pew by pew, behind the choir, and walked round the church. The little ones, Daphne noticed with a throb of pity that hurt her, held the hands of older brothers and sisters, and ran and stumbled along, dropping their books and weeping bitter tears that were unheeded in the roar of:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

One by one the pews in front of the Brunos emptied, and Daphne got quite exhilarated, as it drew near their moment to turn into the nave. Owen, being on the outside of the pew, had to lead off, and he prefaced so unusual a proceeding by looking up at Hollins with eyebrows that obviously inquired into its correctness. Reassured, he stepped out to join the others, first making certain, however, that Hollins and his sister were coming too.

When, after the blessing and a hymn sung most amusingly on one's knees, they passed out with the crowd into the road, they found it quite dark, though they had not yet had tea. They walked quickly down the road, Daphne talking excitedly and skippingly to Hollins about the service. And then the muffin bell sounded. And even while they were drawing attention to it, a muffin-man swung round a distant corner, and approached them along their very pavement.

"Is there muffins for tea?" asked Owen.

"You shouldn't ought to say, Is there? Where's your grammar? You should say, Are there?"

So Daphne said it.

"Well, are there?"

"No, Miss Inquisitive, there aren't."

"Well, couldn't we take some back with us?"

"Well now, did you ever? Of course not."

"Oh, do let's."

Owen said nothing, being not quite clear whether so abnormal a development were all right.

"Oh, Holly, may we?"

Daphne always gained her point by calling Hollins this endearing name.

"You know you didn't ought to buy anything of a Sunday."

"Yes, you ought. Didn't he tell us that the disciples picked the corn as they walked through the field? Why, I believe Owen's is a picture of them.... It is!" She gave a little jump. "Oh, Holly, I believe you're a Pharisee. Look, that's you in the background, looking snitchy."

"You're a clever one," said Hollins. "You say more than your prayers, you do." And, as the muffin-man was now close, she stopped before him.

"Oh, good!" muttered Daphne, as Hollins bought.

They were soon at the wide high street, where the buses were. They clambered inside one, Hollins refusing them permission to mount to the top, on the score that the air after dark was treacherous. So, wrapped up in their reefer coats, they sat in the bus, swinging their legs, and staring up at the advertisements of Sapolio, or down at a new one, which was fixed at the bus's end, a picture of a very discontented baby climbing out of a bath to get a piece of soap.

"What does it say beneath?" asked Owen.

"It says, 'He won't be happy till he gets it.'"

"What's he want it for?"

"How should I know, silly? Eat it, I expect."

Hollins was always shorter with Owen than with Daphne. She believed she had some special feeling for Daphne, having been beside her father when the news came of her birth.

"Did he get it?" asked Daphne.

"How should I know, silly one? No, I don't think he did. He fell down and hurt his nose."

Owen's hand shot to the bridge of his nose in nervous sympathy. He brought it away quickly with a timid glance, to see if any one had remarked so absurd a motion. But no one had because the bus had stopped to allow of a lady's entrance. As all the seats were occupied, she would have been obliged to stand if Hollins hadn't nudged Owen and whispered, "Who's a little gentleman now?" Owen was dreading this; not because he minded giving up his seat, but because he so disliked the publicity, and the not knowing what to say to the lady. She, however, saved him from speech by saying, "Well, that is kind of you," and Hollins by adding, "Not at all. He's pleased."

When they were home again, they found that Miss Durgon was out, and not likely to be back all the evening. Then it was that Daphne heard Hollins mutter her mysterious words, "I guessed as much. I thought so.... Well, come down to my room, and we'll have a jolly tea together there.... Ha—I knew it...."

Down in her common little sitting-room, she poked up the fire till it flared with excitement.

"I do like a nice blaze on a winter's afternoon. There's nothing like a bit of a flare to cheer you up. See that blue flame? That means frost. Now you watch that, and if you're very good, I'll bring up something that's even better than muffins."

"Oh, what's that, what's that?" demanded Daphne.

"Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies," teased Hollins as she disappeared. In a few minutes she returned with a paper bag, and, kneeling heavily on the rug before the fire, produced chestnuts, to a shriek of delight from Daphne and a request for further information and explanation from Owen. The chestnuts were placed on the bars of the fire.

After tea they told stories in the glow of the fire, and had a concert, singing with the help of Hollins, "Way down upon the Swanee River," and the hymn, "I love to hear the story," not out of piety but because its tune was so curly. And lastly, Hollins gave her famous solo about the little tailor boy, who went skipping into smoke with a broadcloth under his arm:

With a broadcloth under his arm,
With a broadcloth under his arm,
And the little tailor boy went skipping into smoke
With a broadcloth under his arm.

Which was always a signal for Hollins to say, "And now you go skipping off to bed."

CHAPTER II

Daphne was growing tall. If by mistake she ran into a room of visitors and rushed out again with an "Oh, sorry!" the impression she left was of thin legs seen above the knee, and untidy brown hair. Also of a hot blush, less of shyness than of sudden guilt and consequent laughter. And somebody was sure to say, "She's going to be a tomboy and no mistake." Her high spirits were so high that often when she was alone she felt she could scream with them. This over-plus of vitality, her father used to say hopefully, would run to creative work or a passionate love one day.

Disliking most things that Miss Durgon recommended, Daphne had not decided what sort of character she would like to have. She was a malleable mass. But one ambition was warming. The frequent repetition of the phrase "tomboyish" had pleased her, and she decided to live up to it. She decided to hate dolls, doll's houses and sewing. And she was secretly pleased when people said, "The girl ought to have been the boy, and the boy ought to have been the girl," for she did not doubt that she could dominate Owen any day of the week. This desire to be masculine, introduced from without, was perhaps the earliest principle to strike a root in her.

She imagined that her hatred of repression—or, in other words, her hatred of Miss Durgon—was the natural outcome of her manliness. The obvious fact that Owen was timid of their guardian while she could be outspokenly rebellious, and, please God, intended to be more so, gave her a deal of satisfaction.

Once, sitting in the little room below stairs, and talking to Hollins, who was working a sewing-machine, she asked her for an opinion on Miss Durgon.

"Is she a good woman, Hollins?"

Hollins appeared to lift her lips towards her nose.

"Well, that's not for me to say. What some of us think we keep to ourselves."

"I say, Hollins, shall I tell you what I think, if you tell me what you think."

"No; I shan't tell you what I think if you tell me what you think."

"Oh, Hollins!"

Hollins turned the wheel monotonously, her head slightly on one side.

"There are some things one thinks that are best thought and left at that."

"But why?"

"Why? Because they ain't pretty, silly one. Now do you know?"

"You mean, you think Miss Durgon a beast?"

"Miss Daphne, I never said nothing of the sort. And I'll thank you not to go putting it about that I did."

Daphne started to be ingratiating.

"No, but you meant it, didn't you, Hollins?"

"I never, so there! All I mean is, some people are made in their own way and can't help it."

"Made what way, Hollins?"

Hollins snapped an entangled thread.

"Made so as they know how to worm themselves into positions, and sort of make themselves indispensable, and get the power into their hands. Oh, it's clever; I'd be the last to say it wasn't."

"She doesn't like you, Hollins."

"She doesn't, doesn't she? Milady doesn't. Well, I wonder now if that'll spoil my appetite. I wonder if I shall lay awake fretting about that.... And how, Miss Mischief, may you happen to know whether she likes me or not?"

"Because she often says I oughtn't to hang about you so much."

"She does? Says you shouldn't ought to hang about me so much? Oh! There's where you are. I hold me tongue from speaking against her, but she'll say what she likes about me readily enough. There's the lady. And mind you, I've kep' quiet about more things than one I've noticed.

"I've noticed, f'r instance—however.... Common people like Hollins, you see, haven't got eyes, and what they think don't matter, as they've no brains worth speaking of...."

The forces moving towards a more overt war between Daphne and Miss Durgon were not only working in Daphne. Miss Durgon, who had now been many years with Mr. Bruno, was no longer nervous of jeopardising her position by a false move. She had summed up her employer, and knew that his love of ease and unworried seclusion would resist any idea of change. She was still under forty-five, and very different, of course, from what she appeared to the eyes of her wards. Naught of her slimness or good carriage had left her, and now that she was earning a fair stipend and could supplement it from the housekeeping money, she dressed remarkably well. To people of her own generation and class she showed a vivacity and cleverness such as never appeared before those creatures who could not interest her—children and servants. Of late Miss Durgon had enjoyed the admiration of some men, though in each case, unfortunately, they were the husbands of her friends.

This admiration had increased her self-respect, and, as a result, her indignation at the rebelliousness of Daphne. The indignation demanded an early overthrow of the child. And by the side of this sense that Daphne must be taught her place sat an unhealthy but growing desire. Though she knew nothing about suppressed sex, she saw that there was perversion somewhere in an idea that could so stimulate her. She wanted to whip Daphne at least once. There was a sensuous quality about the child that would make the whipping of her pleasant.

The collision came when Miss Durgon tried to stop Daphne's game of "Getting up early."

The children had discovered this game in the months before their father left for India. Those were summer days, and Daphne would wake up Owen as soon as she herself was awakened by the sunlight streaming behind the blinds and the chatter of the birds in Queen's Club Gardens. They would dress with all the interest of getting up before any one else was astir, and then creep down the stairs, a little nervous of the deserted, blind-dimmed house. Unchaining and unbolting the hall door, they ran out into the sunny publicity of Deseret Road. In their hands they carried a toy cricket bat (one solid piece of yellow wood without a splice), four stumps and a tennis ball. Their destination was a sunken waste ground at the corner of Goscombe Road, which, though hillocky, weed-grown, and not empty of refuse, required no great imagination to be converted into Queen's Club Gardens. There they would set their stumps and imitate the white-flannelled cricketers whom they had watched from their back windows. Daphne represented Cambridge and Owen Oxford.

The clearest line of division in the human race was that which divided the people who were Oxford from those who were Cambridge. Owen was Oxford, because Oxford always won the Boat-race; Daphne was Cambridge because Cambridge never did. There were other reasons for their choice: Owen was Oxford because his father was, and his name began with an O; Daphne was Cambridge because light blue was a nicer colour than dark blue, and D, her initial, was nearer C than O, and because hardly any one else she knew was Cambridge, and because Owen was Oxford.

Cambridge batted first, and Owen, for Oxford, opened the bowling. If Owen's ball came near enough, she tried to hit it; and when she missed it, ran after it, picked it up and returned it to him.

"Bowl us something one can hit," she shouted.

Sometimes, after she had hit it, Owen stopped it and gathered it up; and then she would instruct him to hold it while she ran to his stump and back.

"That's what I have to do," she explained.

So Owen examined the stitches of the tennis ball while Daphne ran to where he was standing and back to her wicket.

"Now you bowl again."

"But when can I bat?"

"When you've knocked over these three stumps, silly. Don't you know the game?"

Owen looked a little sulky.

"I can't hit them with you in front."

"Well, when I've made thirty I'll retire."

When Daphne bowled she would only consent to bowl over-arm. That was the way they did it at Queen's Club. Sometimes the milkman would stay his clattering cart to watch her, and call out: "Good old W. G.! What price Lord 'Awke?" His "That's right! Sling 'em up, miss!" always deepened the colour of her cheeks, already warmed with running; and she would try to impress him by sending down an especially good ball. If it proved, however, to be rather wide she would call out to Owen loud explanations of so unusual a failure, hoping to keep her reputation with the milkman. When the game was over she hurried back to tell her father the result of the match, the number of runs she had scored, and how she had been obliged to retire in order that Owen might have an innings.

But now that Mr. Bruno was abroad Miss Durgon withdrew her consent from the game. At breakfast one morning, when she heard that they had been out, she pronounced, as all rose from the table:

"You're not to do that any more. Do you clearly understand?"

"Why?" asked Daphne, with symptoms of sulkiness.

"Why? Because I say so. You must allow me to know better than you. Ladies' children don't play in the streets."

(In the vocabulary of Miss Durgon there were two kinds of children—"ladies' children" and "district children," the latter being sometimes called "poor people's children.")

"Father used to let us," grumbled Daphne.

"Don't answer back. Your father has entrusted your bringing up to me, and doesn't want to be bothered about it. You're older now, too. Besides, cricket isn't a nice game for a little girl."

"Why?"

"Never mind why. You'll understand these things later on. It's indelicate."

Daphne was a little nervous of her next remark, but as she was more frightened of convicting herself of fear, she hurriedly forced it out.

"I shall ask father when he comes back."

"You excessively rude little girl!" exclaimed Miss Durgon. "You want a good whipping. I've a good mind to give you one. You've been getting quite out of hand lately."

That Miss Durgon was empowered to give her a whipping had not entered Daphne's mind. Hitherto, when it had been a case for such extreme measures, Miss Durgon had spoken to her father. But that was when she had been very young. These words of her guardian momentarily repulsed her. But feeling the ignominy of surrender, and observing that Owen was staring open-mouthed from one to the other as they exchanged these interesting remarks, she persisted. One had to play up before him.

"In the Bible they played in the streets. Father Alderwood said so. They played at funerals in the market-place, and Jesus Christ played with them——"

"Daphne! I never heard such talk. Go out of the room at once. How dare you talk blasphemously like that? Upon my soul—mark my words—if you try on this arguing with me I shall one day take a stick to you. I mean it. Mixing up religion and play like that! Little humbug!"

"I'm not a humbug," said Daphne, walking round the breakfast table to keep it between Miss Durgon and herself.

"You're a little humbug," repeated Miss Durgon, who had so lost her temper as hardly to know what she was talking about. "Parading religion, and at the same time being insolent and disobedient. You're a regular little Pharisee."

To be called what you have called others is always as wounding as it is astonishing.

"I'm not a Pharisee." The tears sprang to Daphne's eyes.

"Yes, you are; and will you keep quiet, I tell you?"

"Well, if I'm a Pharisee, you're a Sadducee."

"Upon my soul! Come here! Don't run away! It's no good; I shall catch you sooner or later." Miss Durgon had paused, feeling the indignity of running after a child. "Insulting a woman who's giving up her life to you like that! Sadducee indeed! You don't know what a Sadducee is."

"Yes, I do. It's some one who doesn't believe in the Resurrection."

"Daphne, come here. I'm going to give you a thorough good whipping. You've earned it richly."

Daphne ran towards the door. Miss Durgon arrived there at the same time. Daphne slipped past her, and, crying loudly, ran out of the room. She heard Miss Durgon call, "Stop that child!" so raced upstairs, and remembering the bolt on the bathroom door, rushed in, slammed the door, and shot home the bolt.

Breathless, she threw herself on the linoleum floor, and sobbed with heaving shoulders. Knocks came to the door, and the voice of Miss Durgon.

"Open at once, Daphne. Bad, naughty little girl! Open the door at once."

"I shan't! I shan't!" sobbed Daphne.

The door shook. Daphne had a wild idea, should the door yield, of leaping out of the window and crashing to her death in the street. She jumped up at a moment when the door seemed likely to give, and flung up the sash.

"What are you doing?" cried the alarmed Miss Durgon, and the door ceased to shake. "Daphne, what are you doing?"

Daphne roared through her tears.

"If you come in, I'm going out of the window. Out of the window."

"You're a bad, evil little girl. I'm sure I don't know what to do with you."

Miss Durgon retired; and Daphne and she were separated by the bathroom door, both a little alarmed at the storm, and rather vague as to how it had arisen.

More than once this bathroom had been the scene of a solitary performance at which Daphne would have been ashamed to be caught, though it gave her a sweet, troubled delight such as no other game could give. It had sprung from the everlasting lilt in her mind of some lines of poetry, found in her history after the story of King Charles's beheading:

He nothing common did nor mean
Upon that memorable scene ...

Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
    But bowed his comely head
    Down, as upon a bed.

The nature of her delight in them she did not analyse; but a kindred delight—an emotion not empty of troubling—had used to come to her, in the old home, when she saw a shaft of yellow lamplight thrown on to evening grass; or a wood of dark firs spining a hill in the landscape's blue distance; or those stretches of rusty bracken, with here and there a lonely, blown tree, that were Shadwell Common in autumn; or red firelight on old wood, when sunset had fallen before tea, and the lamps were not yet lit. It was the same haunting something that came out of Hans Andersen: "She flew away as if she were flying straight into the sun." And the old nursery rhyme had it:

How many miles to Babylon?
    Three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
    Aye, there and back again.

"He nothing common did nor mean." A scene in which she died like that, wrongfully condemned but too proud to protest her innocence, was Daphne's shameful game in the bathroom behind a bolted door. At first she used to place the chair for a block, and walk towards it through a street of staring faces. Before its feet she knelt down, so that her hair fell away from the neck. There, without visible tremor, she awaited the blow.

But gradually the drama in this form failed to express fully the movements within her. She wanted the cruelly executed person to be herself, Daphne Bruno, not a character in history. And in these days people were never beheaded. If the game was to satisfy her, it must be brought into the realism of the present. And so it changed into a trial for murder, where Daphne stood in the dock (her hands on the woodwork round the bath) and listened in silence to the perjury of witnesses, or turned grave, brave eyes on the judge as he pronounced the sentence. After hearing his words, while the tense solemnity remained in the court, she made a brief speech, proclaiming her faith that her character would one day be cleared, and thanking those friends in the gallery who had never doubted her innocence, and the Q.C. who had defended her as ably as it was in the power of man to do.

Then, having done nothing common, mean or vulgar, she turned and followed the warder to the condemned cell.

But to-day, in stormy mood, she could play no such game. Picking herself up from the floor, she sat sideways on the chair with her arm along its back. Her sobs were now internal and intermittent. The chair as a permanent seat proved uncomfortably hard, so she sat on the cork mat on the linoleum and picked off chips from its broken corner. When this palled, she stood up and traced her finger along the squares in the tiled wallpaper, reaching at last the hole in the plaster made by the door-key. Here she played "snowstorms," putting a finger in the hole and, by scratching it downwards, sending a tenuous shower of powdered plaster to the floor. But this palled too.

Very quiet was the house, as if her disgrace were like an illness, compelling all the inmates to go about their business with subdued steps. She looked out of the window, and watched the passing of carts and pedestrians. Sometimes she saw children known to her, and drew away her head lest they guessed anything.

If only she had a book to read! If only she could make a silent dash up the next flight of stairs to the nursery, and seize a book, and rush back to her fastness! Guiltily she pulled the bolt, opened the door, and listened. Not a sound anywhere. She tiptoed through an ante-room on to the landing, and then leapt like a chamois from stair to stair. Her heart beat fast as she searched quickly along the shelf that contained her few books. There was hardly anything she had not read several times, except, indeed, "Little Women," that Aunt Belle had given her for her birthday, and she had refused to read on account of its feminine title. On the ground floor a door shut. Instantly she seized the book, and hurtled downstairs to her bathroom. She rested her book on the woodwork round the bath, whose varnish had been so spoiled by soap; and with her head on her left palm and her right hand playing with the tap-handles, she began to read. In a few minutes the tap-handles were neglected; she was in America with Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy. Her disgrace withdrew from memory, save in moments when she contrasted Miss Durgon with the lovable Marmee, or saw a likeness between her and the peppery Aunt March. The high sentiments emitted by Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy made her feel rather good herself.

Wearying of the hard seat, she placed the open book upon the floor, and herself on her stomach before it, with her hands supporting her chin, her legs opened, and one foot occasionally rising into the air. By now the Marches were the most fascinating family in the world.

The book must surely be literature of a high order, with all those noble resolutions and elegant little sermons by Marmee. There stirred in Daphne, for the first time, the ambition to write. She stopped reading for a minute, and stared over the book's edge. As pain in the adult artist liberates itself in created work, so Daphne's present misery sought liberation in a dream of great books. Books of this kind, very sad and uplifting and beautiful. The Marches stood cataleptically fixed in the positions in which she had left them, while her thoughts swept forward over a life of successes, and down many side avenues, and beyond death into the long centuries of fame. Yes, she had made a decision; she would be an authoress. It was thrilling. She released the Marches from their trance, and followed their rapid movements again. But the dream had to be returned to.... Only after many such breaks did the book win her back to oblivious concentration.

Then, in the enthralling company of Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy, she guessed nothing of the passage of time, till the house filled with a smell of greens and roasting fat; and dinner-things began to clatter in the dining-room. Mingled with her reading was a wonder if anything would be done about her dinner. She was quite determined she was not going to unlock the door and go downstairs. The dinner-bell rang—louder than usual, as though addressed to her—but she did not move. Only now she could no longer read; she could only listen. Evidently, by the silence, they had sat down to the meal, leaving her to come or stay away as she cared. Further clattering of plates; that was the meat-course being taken downstairs—and she was too late now for any. Here was the pudding coming up the stairs and being taken in. And now, to judge by the silence, they were eating it.... Ah, footsteps were coming up to her landing, rather slowly, as of a person who found it none too easy to manage all the stairs of these London houses.

A heavy breath heaved on the landing. Hollins, undoubtedly.

"If I had a sovereign every time I climbed these stairs, I should be a wealthy woman. Dearie ... dearie, are you there?" Daphne answered with a shapeless sound. "Why not come down and have something to eat? I've come myself to ask you. She's given orders that nothing's to be kep' hot for you. Come down, there's a good girl. You can't go starving yourself, you know. Even I should call that naughty of you. Come on, dear, you must eat something. There's no smell in nothing, as the saying is."

"Am I going to be whipped?"

"Well, she says so. She says you're making your punishment worse by this persisting. But I dare say she's only trying it on. She's punishing you in another way, and I do call it nasty." The door was open twelve inches by this time. "She's purposely taking Master Owen to the Zoo this afternoon. Heaven knows I'm the last person to encourage children to be saucy, but if I'd been him, I'd uv refused to go...."

Daphne shut the door, but gently, in Hollins's face and slid the bolt home; silently, so that Hollins should not be offended. Hollins's voice pursued through the wood: "Never mind, darling. Never mind. When they've gone you and I'll go for a nice walk together. And now come and eat something. Spite of what she says, I've kep' a plateful in the oven."

Daphne's reply was moaned:

"I'm not coming down to be whipped."

"No, and I'm not sure that I blame you, neither.... Well, don't cry, silly one. Let's hope they'll start soon, and then you can come out."

When she was gone, Daphne went to the window, out of which she stared dreamily at the stretch of Deseret Road. Already she had heard the rush of Owen's feet up the stairs, and the preparations of Miss Durgon in her room; and it was not long before the descending steps were heard, and the movements in the hall, and the shutting of the front door. In a second they would be in view. There they were, Miss Durgon walking quickly, and Owen running at her side. Once Owen turned round and, after looking up at the bathroom window, said something to Miss Durgon, but she walked on without impairing her dignity by a look behind. Daphne slipped out of sight—she had not wanted Owen to see her.

Now she opened the door and carried her swollen eyes and red nose down into the dining-room. There was no one there. Too ashamed to show herself to the servants in the basement, she moved heavily about, hoping her feet would be heard by Hollins. A sham fit of coughing was also tried. Then she heard the jingling of a tray, and Hollins coming up the steep stairs.

"There!" said Hollins, as she placed the tray on the table, "I expect you'll enjoy it all the more for being hungry."

Seeing Daphne's eyes, she gathered her against her breast, muttering only, "What a shame! What a shame!"

The walk in the afternoon was clouded for Daphne by her memory of the morning's emotion and by the shadow of the evening when Miss Durgon would return. She was subdued as they passed along the shop-windows. One bright interlude came when Hollins stopped in front of a sweet-shop and told her to choose a penn'orth to her fancy. Every jar or dish in the window she examined. "Hundreds of Thousands" were four ounces a penny, but they went so quickly. "Pontefract Cakes" didn't last, either. "Liquorice, Linseed and Chlorodyne Lozenges" were always good, because little bits could be broken off and dissolved slowly in the mouth, flavouring it for hours; but grown-up people forbade these as drugs. A glass jar of gelatine discs at two ounces a penny decided her. These discs, sometimes used for mending broken panes, stayed in the mouth for a wonderful time, and could even be taken out and kept in a handkerchief. It would be lovely to lie on the ground sucking them while she pursued the adventures of Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy. For already the book, whose atmosphere had never quite dissolved, was calling for her return. She persuaded Hollins to take her once past the fire-station on the chance that their arrival might synchronise with a call for the engines. Never yet had she seen the great doors swung open, the horses harnessed like lightning, and the smoking, spark-dropping engines galloped past a gathered crowd. But her despairing conviction that there would be no movement in the station proved correct. Only a faint thrill could be got from the rows of shining helmets on both walls, and the shining brass of the engines.

The walk home was depressing since it led to the moment of Miss Durgon's return; and when they were in the hall Daphne suggested that, now she had had her walk, she should go back to the bathroom and bolt the door.

"No, you're not going to," said Hollins. "She shan't whip you now. If she says she will, I shall take the liberty of telling her that she's punished you once by not taking you to the Zoo.... You read your book and we'll see."

So after tea, Daphne read on, sucking the gelatine discs. But the reading was all spoiled by her underthinking, which kept reminding her that Miss Durgon was due. On the sounds of people coming up the front-door steps, her heart leapt in fright. The latch-key turned, the door opened, and an umbrella was put into the hat-stand. Here was Hollins toiling up the basement stairs to her defence. Her voice mingled in the passage with Miss Durgon's. Then she entered.

"She says you're to go to bed. She says she's no wish to see you at all." (In truth, Daphne's stormy revolt had quite frightened away Miss Durgon's desire to whip her.) "She says——"

Just then Owen rushed in to tell his sister all about the Zoo, but he had scarcely uttered a word before Hollins interrupted:

"Well, I took you for a little gentleman, I did."

Owen looked at Hollins with the timid glance of the corrected.

"A little gentleman wouldn't mention anything about where he'd been, a little gentleman wouldn't."

Owen lapsed into a dubious silence, while Daphne declared:

"I didn't want to go to his dirty, beastly old Zoo"; and Hollins hastened to prevent trouble by saying:

"Now, Miss Daphne, that'll do. Suppose you zoo off to bed."

CHAPTER III

In the beginning Miss Durgon had given the children their lessons. But now her dignity, generated in the warm air of leisure and comparative luxury, and sunned by certain other things that lay beyond the walls of Mr. Bruno's home (and beyond the walls of his knowledge), was, if anything, given a sharper outline by Daphne's insolent rebellion. Transformed from an impecunious gentlewoman who sought a housekeeper's situation into a lady of social graciousness, who consented to take over the reins of a distinguished writer's home, she began to think it unreasonable that she should be asked to play nursery governess to a brace of obstreperous children. So, on Mr. Tenter Bruno's return from the East, she laid before him a project that had long been maturing in her mind. He looked up from his easy chair and his book, desirous only of being relieved as quickly as possible from this visit of a domestic problem.

"Yes, by all means, tell me, Miss Durgon. By all means...."

She explained. She felt that the engagement of a daily governess for her charges would be well worth the small outlay entailed. The children were getting older and should have longer time for lessons than she could give them. She was worried by the feeling that she was hardly doing justice to the two departments of her work: the management of his household and the education of his children.

"Forgive me," smiled Mr. Bruno. "The market in governesses is a thing I've so little studied that I've no conception what they cost. Are they quoted these days at two figures or three? ... H'm," he added, seeing his housekeeper uncomfortably bewildered. "Their salaries, I mean."

"Forty pounds a year, with lunch and tea, should secure us a really good governess."

Mr. Bruno had a restive feeling that if he could purchase the right to continue his present chapter for forty pounds a year, it had best be done.

"Oh, well, we could afford that much," he said.

"Yes," confirmed Miss Durgon, "and then I should be at liberty to devote myself entirely to the management of the house and the moral care of Daphne and Owen—with, of course, the oversight of their studies."

Mr. Bruno's hand turned a page of his book, and Miss Durgon therefore stepped obligingly towards the door. It was as she had foreseen; he would edge away from any long thinking on a theme unrelated to his books.

"Of course, you'll do all the advertising and interviewing necessary," he tendered over the tops of his reading spectacles, now happily replaced. "I cannot possibly be besieged by young governesses."

Miss Durgon assured him that she would certainly undertake all that.

And few undertakings could have given her more pleasure. It was a serene satisfaction to be on the luxurious employing side of an advertisement in the Warden, after inhabiting the meagre country on the employee's side. She saw herself sitting with some state in the dining-room and giving an audience to nervous applicants. She would be impressively dressed for them.

There were but two replies to her advertisement for a "governess, young, bright, willing," of which she had only ordered one insertion, since it was being paid for out of the housekeeping money. To these two applicants she wrote instructions for them to call at given hours. The first was a lady unmistakably older than Miss Durgon herself, and quite unsuitable, because it would be difficult to order her about; besides, the creature was offensively careful to parade the plumes of a fallen gentlewoman. The second, who called an hour later that morning, seemed far more suitable, and her suitability received adventitious increase from the contrast with her predecessor. She was a little spare sprig of a girl who could be easily planted and trained, and would never, one imagined, dare to be "superior" with such a long-rooted and graceful tree as her lady employer. Her round cheeks, slightly flushed, her simple frock, her hair the tint of a harvest field, and her shy, escaping eyes were the likely efflorescence of a nature ingenuous and pliable.

When Miss Durgon floated into the dining-room, wearing the majesty of a prospective employer, this little Miss Carrell rose respectfully and remained standing; and it was not till Miss Durgon had taken her chair and rested leisured and well-to-do hands on her lap that Miss Carrell, in response to a hint, sat on the edge of an arm-chair, holding her little handbag on her knees. And yet she was not nervous, Miss Durgon saw; it was simply good manners.

"I am Miss Durgon, who wrote to you, you know. I am the—er—the guardian of Mr. Tenter Bruno's children; in fact, I've managed everything for him since his dear wife died in giving birth to the younger child." Miss Durgon paused, thinking that perhaps this slip of a girl understood none of these things. "Well, Miss—er——"

"Carrell," breathed the girl.

"Of course, of course. Well, Miss Carrell, I want to do my best for these children—in fact, hitherto I've felt I ought to teach them the elements myself; no one can do it so well as their parent or guardian; but now they're getting bigger and demanding too much of my time, and Mr. Bruno's household is a large and increasing charge, and my social engagements forbid me doing full justice to the children's needs."

"I quite see," was wafted from the easy chair.

"Yes. Well, I imagine you would arrive in the morning, soon after breakfast, and give them lessons till one o'clock, having lunch with them—and then perhaps a walk in the afternoon, and tea. And after that Hollins will take care of them till bedtime. Hollins, I should tell you, is of her kind, an excellent person, whom I retain in the service of the house, though I must say she's not very loyal to me, and I've reason to believe is not above speaking against me; but she's been with the family since before her mistress died, and you know these old servants—they never do take to, or admit any good in a new—er——"

"New regime," supplied the easy chair understandingly. "Yes, I know. They're always like that."

"Yes, admit any good in a new regime. Well, I suppose you've had some experience."

"Oh, yes." Miss Carrell bowed her pale hair over her hand-bag and produced an envelope. "I can show you this testimonial. I have been for three years a mistress at Hemans House."

She said this (unfolding the testimonial) as though she expected any well-informed woman to know Hemans House by repute; and Miss Durgon, in knowing nothing about the place, felt in danger of a social fall.

"Oh, were you? That's interesting. But you hardly look old enough for——"

"I am twenty-two," interrupted Miss Carrell.

"You went as junior mistress, I imagine."

"Yes. But later on Miss Vidella entrusted the elder girls to me quite a lot. You see, I'd been there over two years, which was longer than any of the other mistresses——"

"This Miss—Verdella, did you say?—must have been difficult to get on with."

Miss Carrell shrugged.

"Well, she was rather quaint." A blush rushed over her face, as if she had unthinkingly let some little monkeyish animal, deliberately battened underground, peep out its nose. "I don't think the other mistresses tried to understand her and shape themselves to her ways."

"And why did you leave, if you were so helpful to Miss Verdella?" asked Miss Durgon, who, not having noticed the peep, was thinking, "This girl is just what I want," and imagining herself making of Miss Carrell a pleasant companion, though a properly subservient one.

"Oh, mother was not at all well, and I felt I ought to get daily employment and live at home. Here is Miss Vidella's testimonial."

The sheet of notepaper accepted by Miss Durgon showed, beneath the name, "Hemans House" and a crest, a paragraph written in an inordinately neat and punctilious hand:

Miss Vidella has pleasure in testifying that Miss Mary Carrell was an assistant mistress at this school for nine terms, during which she gave every satisfaction, discharging her very responsible duties with propriety and considerable ability.

AMY VIDELLA.

Miss Durgon handed it back.

There was further question and answer, much of which amounted to saying again, in a different shade or with new accompaniments, what had been said before; and then Miss Durgon hinted:

"Well, I shall be interviewing other applicants, so I will let you know my decision later."

Miss Carrell rose obediently.

"Thank you very much indeed. I feel I could do all you want. Though I'm afraid I can't let you know finally till the day after to-morrow, as I am seeing some other parents to-morrow, and one the following day."

It was said so gently that Miss Durgon could suspect neither impertinence nor guile. And directly she heard of these other prospective employers she desired to secure at once this only suitable girl. And really, too, despite her vesture of an employer's ease, she had no experience of engaging governesses.

"Hum. That's a nuisance. I'm particularly anxious to know definitely by this time to-morrow. I think—yes, I think that, for my part, I could definitely say that I should be prepared to offer you the—the post. Is it at all likely that you could decide definitely now? Are the other situations likely to be more attractive than this one?"

"No, I don't think so," said Miss Carrell, her bag in her hand, and prepared to leave. "Only—only one of them is worth fifty pounds a year—and, for mother's sake, I feel I ought to consider it."

"Fifty pounds a year! That seems a large salary for so young a woman. I don't think Mr. Bruno would be prepared to give that."

"No," agreed Miss Carrell, "and I've no doubt you will get somebody equally suitable for a less amount. Thank you so much for considering——"

"Yes, but wait a minute. Mr. Bruno entrusts most of these affairs to me, and I feel I can commit him to fifty pounds a year. I am so anxious to have things settled early. Would you say definitely that you would come if I offered that?"

Miss Carrell smiled brightly and gratefully.

"Yes, I think so. I don't like to force you up in that way—but I have my mother to consider."

By now Miss Durgon could picture the mother in her shabby room, and felt a pity, mixed with inevitable contempt, for the indigent lady.

"Precisely. Then you will come?"

Miss Carrell nodded and smiled.

Daphne was excited about the arrival of a new governess, and Owen pretended to the same enthusiasm, though, to tell the truth, he could not see that it was matter for congratulation. But Daphne had ascertained from Hollins that the approaching Miss Carrell was little and pretty and fair-haired. "Almost a child herself, you might say, and likely to be as much a playfellow, so to put it, as a governess. I don't often take to people first go-off, as the saying is, but there, she fair got me."

"Well, she'll be better than old Durgon," answered Daphne, who liked abusing the housekeeper to Hollins, perceiving that, though the "sauce" was properly condemned, it was not unsavoury.

"Now, then, Miss Daphne, you're getting that rude and bold, I don't know what's coming over you."

"Well, she is a beast, and you know you think it."

Owen, who was listening, looked alarmed at such a plain statement of fact.

"I know I never said such a thing in my life," affirmed Hollins. "You know I never."

"Saying's one thing, and thinking's another."

"And saucing's one thing, and getting out of my way when I'm busy's another. So you be gone, miss, or it'll be idling's one thing and bed's another."

It was early evening, before bedtime, and Daphne, hardly knowing why she did it, ran into her father's study. She forgot to knock, and was only checked half-way across the carpet by a mutter of protest from the lips of Mr. Bruno, who, sitting in his easy chair, dropped his book a few inches, but no farther.

"The idea embodied in a closed door, Miss Cataract, is that it should be nervously knocked at—even apologetically knocked at—by mere idle children. Also, should it admit them on sufferance, that they must tread delicately across the privacy beyond."

Since his return from India he had been aware of something in his daughter's large, sparkling eyes and unrestrained naturalness that always compelled him to adopt with her a gnomic tone, highly civilised. He liked to dazzle her with a Roman candle of words, or reduce her to temporary immobility with some massive period. His skill at the game pleased him.

"Well, can I come in?"

"On a rapidly expiring lease—yes."

Daphne stood there and wondered what she had come for.

"We've got a new governess, papa."

"I should have thought a lion-tamer was more what was wanted."

"She's coming on Monday."

"Well, it seems hardly an occasion for turbulent rejoicing. A task-mistress who will (I hope) press your nose firmly on a grindstone is not a new doll or a new dress."

"I hate dolls."

"I forgot. Let us say, then, she's not a new football. Why this strange frenzy?"

"Oh, it'll be fun."

"I haven't gathered from Miss Durgon that you saw much humour in your tasks with her."

"I hate Miss Durgon."

"Hush, mænad! What you hate is restraint and healthy discipline. I hope this new governess swishes you often and soundly."

The subject of whipping always fascinated Daphne. She was accustomed to ask her friends in a lowered voice if their fathers and mothers whipped them, and to read over and over again all stories where such execution was done on refractory boys and girls. It was a subject that gave a curious exaltation similar to that provided by pictures of little black savages disappearing into the maw of a crocodile.

"Were you ever whipped, papa?"

"Most certainly. And by its gracious effect I am what I am."

"Well, why don't you ever whip me and Owen?"

She sat on the table to hear his explanation.

"I am a very busy man, Duffy; and though the task you suggest is important and honourable, and of real service to society—even one to which no artist need be ashamed to lend a hand—I yet presume to think that the work on which I am at present engaged"—he significantly replaced his glasses—"is even more important. Besides, I can remember past occasions when——"