'Take care, Master Ratton will be jealous,' said Edgar, as he claimed her for the next dance, a quadrille.
'Jealous! oh no! Some people one never thinks of complimenting.'
Cherry caught the words, and wondered what they meant.
A few more dances, and then came Wilmet's anxiously contrived supper.
'I say,' observed Will Harewood to Lance, 'why can't we have things like this at home?'
''Tisn't their nature to,' judiciously responded Lance.
'This cream is quite up to the grub we get after a crack let-off in the Close,' added Will; for requisitions for their voices at private concerts had made the choir connoisseurs in the relics of feasts.
'Better, I should say,' returned Lance. 'Mettie doesn't make it of soap, or arsenic, or verdigris, like old Twopenny.'
'What! you don't mean that she made it herself!'
'Of course! who else should?'
'My eyes! And to see her looking like that!' Then, with a deep sigh, 'If I could only book her for my wife on the spot!'
Whence it may be inferred, that Stella's birthday party was not only a brilliant success, but might, in Wilmet's phrase, 'lead to something.' All it seemed to have led to at present was a discovery on the part of the good Miss Pearsons, that the household they had been wont to pity as small orphan children, now contained three fine young men.
At least Geraldine connected this with the desire they expressed that Alice might enjoy the same opportunities as Robina of giving her acquirements a final polish, up to diploma pitch. A correspondence commenced, resulting in Miss Knevett being engaged as teacher, being remunerated by lessons in languages and accomplishments. The arrangement gave universal satisfaction; Cherry could not detect any regret on the part of Felix; Alice would still spend her holidays with her aunts; and the sense that her departure was near made the intercourse between the two houses more frequent and familiar than it had ever yet been.
One evening Cherry, while looking up a quotation for Felix in Southey's Doctor, lit on his quaint theory of the human soul having previously migrated through successive stages of vegetable and animal life, and still retaining something characteristic from each transmigration. Her brothers were a good deal tickled with the idea; and Lance exclaimed, 'I know who must have been rhubarb, queen-wasp, and a hen-harrier.'
'Oh, that's too bad!' cried Robina.
'Why a hen-harrier?' asked Felix, recognising, like almost all the others.
'One of the birds of prey where the female is bigger than her mate,' drily observed Edgar.
'Besides,' said Cherry,' recollect the hen-harrier's countenance in pictures, with beady eyes, and a puffed supercilious smile about the beak.'
'Why, that's Lady Price!' chimed in Alice, making the discovery at last.
Lengthily and gravely Edgar uttered the words, 'Puzzle-monkey, praying mantis, sacred stork, howler.'
Lance and Robin roared with merriment, and after one glance at Clement's half virtuous, half offended countenance, Felix and Cherry fell into like convulsions; while Alice exclaimed, 'But who is it?' and Angel shouted the sufficiently evident answer, 'Clement, oh! the howler, the black preaching monkey in a natural surplice!'
'I can't think how you do it!' exclaimed Alice.
'I object to the mantis,' Cherry struggled to say. 'Nasty hypocritical creature that eats things up.'
'Praying for its living, eh, Cherry?' said wicked Edgar. 'If you had ever seen the long thin animal, with head back, hands joined, and pious attitude, you couldn't doubt.'
And as he spoke he sketched his mischievous likeness, at which the mirth grew more furious; while Cherry, always the most easily excited, uttered in a strangled voice, 'A parsnip, a barn-door hen, a dilapidated Guernsey cow, an old mother whale.'
'O Cherry, Cherry, you've immortalised yourself!' shouted Lance. 'How did you hit off the parsnip? the very thing that had stumped me.'
'The colour, and the odd sort of sweetness,' said Cherry.
'Won't we have fun with it when I go back!' cried Lance.-'Not tell? Nonsense! Why, no one will enjoy it like Mother Harewood herself.'
'Only don't say I made it. There, Edgar has got one.'
'Touch-me-not balsam, blister-fly, bantam-cock (full strut), black terrier.'
He did not caricature this time except with the muscles of his face, and with these he contrived to put on four different aspects, each so exactly like Mr. Mowbray Smith that not even Alice required the proclamation of the name; and Wilmet gravely said, 'I do not think this is a proper sort of game. It must be ill-natured or irreverent.'
'That depends,' said Geraldine, now thoroughly in the swing.-Here! Hawthornden apple-tree, stickleback, goldfinch, beaver.'
'The hardy Norseman's house of yore
Was on the foaming wave,'
sang out Lance, recalling Theodore's substitute for Felix's name.
'Exactly like-figures, tastes, and all,' said Edgar, scanning Felix's clear, bright, fresh face, glossy hair, and rather short figure, at once trim and sturdy. 'The goldfinch hit him off exactly, but I don't see the force of the apple- tree.'
'You would,' said Cherry, 'if you were properly acquainted with our three trees and their individualities. The Hawthornden is a resolute looking fellow, but it indulges in the loveliest pink and white blossoms, and waxen, delicate, peachy fruit.'
'Uncommonly sour! Thank you, Cherry,' said Felix.
'Not in a pie,' suggested Alice.
'Properly treated and sweetened, eh ?' asked he, smiling on her.
'But why is Felix like a stickleback?' said Angela.
'Don't you know?' said Cherry; 'a beautiful bright little fish, and the good male one swims up and down taking care of the nest.'
'I do like the beaver,' allowed Wilmet. 'It always was my favourite beast.'
'It hits off the respectable householder element,' added Edgar. 'Three flaps of his broad tail rule beaverdom like Jupiter's nod.'
'I have one,' interposed Robina.-'Bella-donna lily, working bee, menura-'
'Hold hard!' called Lance; 'is a menura fish, flesh, or fowl?'
'Fowl: the lyre-tailed pheasant, that makes a shelter for its nest with its own tail.'
'Decided liar tale,' muttered Edgar.
'Go on, Bobbie,' Felix encouraged her. The pheasant suits both the twins as well as the bella-donna. Any more?'
'Perhaps the leading stag of the herd.'
'Don't make us like that proud, cowardly, tyrannical beast,' exclaimed Wilmet.
'I have seen you look exactly like one,' said Geraldine. 'That and the pheasant both give the notion of your neck.'
'Such a set of trumpery gaudy things!' grumbled Wilmet. 'Nothing but the bee is tolerable.'
'I did think of a speckled Hamburg hen, and a nice quiet she-goat,' said Robina; 'but they are all dowdy, and would not suit Alda.'
'There's something in the theory,' said Edgar. 'That belladonna approves itself perfectly-so delicate and stately, and yet so essentially unpoetical.'
'That Mettie takes as a compliment,' said Felix, 'only she would rather have been a potato, or a cabbage.'
'Now,' said Cherry, 'you will all know-bell-heather, the grasshopper, the lark, and the squirrel.'
'Is this the lark's crest, or the squirrel's tail!' said Felix, giving an elder brother's pull to the boy's highest wave of hair.
'Or the grasshopper's leap?' cried Lance, springing on him for a bout of buffeting and skirmishing; in the midst of which Alice was heard wondering how the riddles, as she thought them, were either made or guessed.
'They come,' said Geraldine. 'I am only afraid we shall fall into a trick of making them for everybody.'
'I wonder what you would make for me.'
