St. Peter's Finger

sensible children. Can it be that you are a sensible child? For, if so, half my task is accomplished.”

“But I don’t want to help Mother Patrick. I don’t want to help anybody,” said Mary Maslin, through sobs. Mrs. Bradley sat down beside her on a bench which covered school boot-holes, and observed that it was not a very nice day for anybody to be out of doors.

“It isn’t that,” said Mary, obviously in need of a confidante. “It’s because my mother’s come back here to take me away.”

“To take you away from school?”

“Yes. She’s going to let me have a private governess, and perhaps I’m to go to New York. But I don’t want a private governess. I want to stay here with the girls.”

“It certainly seems rather trying,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, “to be obliged to leave school in the middle of term like this.”

“All because of what happened to Ursula,” Mary observed without reticence. “It’s so stupid. As if I should do a dreadful thing like that! They know quite well I shouldn’t!”

“Of course not. But I can understand your mother’s feelings.”

“She wants Ulrica to come away, too. She wants to have her stay with me, and for us to share the governess. And I don’t want that! I don’t like Ulrica much. She’s clever and I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not. I’d hate to be clever and horrible, and I don’t want her anywhere near me! I suppose I can’t say so to mother, but Ulrica scares me. I don’t feel comfortable with her.”

“But you don’t feel comfortable at all,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out. “Look here, Mary, I think I can make you a promise. I will speak to your mother, and although I shall not be able to prevent her from taking you away from the school—in fact, it’s just as well that you should go—a change will do you good— I certainly will see to it that Ulrica doesn’t go with you.”

“Will you?” said Mary Maslin, cheering up a little. “Well, that’ll be something, anyway. Thanks a lot. Well, all right, then, I’ll go and hold bits of stick for Mother Patrick. Doesn’t she look lovely on a ladder?”

Off she went, and Mrs. Bradley, left with a new idea, walked out of the building in quest of one more child. Failing to find one, she went back herself, and meekly assisted in the work. Some of the orchard trees were large and old, and had been cut back by the gardener some weeks earlier in preparation for Mother Patrick’s talents. She first cut them back a little more, and then made a slit between the bark and the wood. Mrs. Bradley and Mary Maslin held delicately-prepared grafts and handed them up on demand, to be inserted in the slit like rather spiky trimming on a hat.

Mother Patrick on a ladder certainly was a fearful and wonderful sight. She had a man’s trick of balance whilst using both her hands, and yet it seemed all the time that her large, ungainly body, its bulk apparently added to by her habit, must at any moment descend, among splintered wreckage, on to the snowdrop-sprinkled orchard ground below.

When the grafts were properly inserted, Mrs. Bradley and Mary handed clay which Mother Patrick clapped upon and moulded round the tree to keep the air, Mrs. Bradley supposed, or curious insects, or, possibly, prying eyes, from the delicate grafts. There was need for something to speculate on, for, as is the way with those who merely stand at the foot of a ladder and hand things up to the master-builder above, the assistants grew tired a long time before Mother Patrick was ready to give up.

“That’s all,” she said at last. “You are a good child, Mary. You must try to do as well in my subjects as your cousin Ulrica can do. Still, to-day you have done well. I shall pray for our work to be blessed. I cannot give you a merit now, because it is holiday time, but remind me to give you one in the next mathematics lesson— however badly you behave!”

“She always calls it ‘behaving.’ She really means ‘answering’ or ‘working,’ ” Mary explained, as she and Mrs. Bradley went to wash. “She really believes that everybody can do her sickening old algebra and geometry if they like. Just like Mother Saint Simon and her science. And they’re for ever throwing Ulrica up at me. Did you have a clever cousin when you were at school?”

“Never. There were no clever members of our family,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “Now I remember, though, I did not go to school.”

“Did you have a governess, then?”

“Alas, no. My father taught us. We merely learned to read, and not to lose our tempers when we argued.”

“What did you read?”

“Oh, Lewis Carroll, and the Bible, and the Swiss Family Robinson,” Mrs. Bradley replied.

“I have never read any of those. Perhaps that is why we are different.”

“It is quite likely. And now, is it time for tea?”

“You don’t fast, do you, during Lent?”

“No. But I never eat much, except when I come upon my chauffeur eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

“Ulrica is trying to fast, but Mother Saint Francis won’t let her. She says we are growing children, and need our food.”

“Most sensible.”

“Yes, it is, really. That’s what I think.”

“Mary,” said Mrs. Bradley, with some suddenness, “was Ulrica in class, do you know, on the afternoon that Ursula died?”

Mary stared at her.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “We’re not in the same form, you see.”

“The third and the fourth forms did have a lesson together that afternoon, though, didn’t they?”