Miss Oliphant twisted the knife in the wound.
“There seems to be plenty of cake, too. How nice for you! Still, I should be careful, if I were you. It looks rather rich. I never could understand,” she went on, addressing Nurse Wilks in a voice which Frederick, who was now about seven years old, considered insufferably grown-up and affected, “why people should find any enjoyment in stuffing and gorging and making pigs of themselves.”
“Boys will be boys,” argued Nurse Wilks.
“I suppose so,” sighed Miss Oliphant. “Still, it’s all rather unpleasant.”
A slight but well-defined glitter appeared in Nurse Wilks’s eyes. She detected a tendency to hoighty-toightiness in her young guest’s manner, and hoighty-toightiness was a thing to be checked.
“Girls,” she said, “are by no means perfect.”
“Ah!” breathed Frederick, in rapturous adhesion to the sentiment.
“Girls have their little faults. Girls are sometimes inclined to be vain. I know a little girl not a hundred miles from this room who was so proud of her new panties that she ran out in the street in them.”
“Nanna!” cried Miss Oliphant pinkly.
“Disgusting!” said Frederick.
He uttered a short laugh: and so full was this laugh, though short, of scorn, disdain, and a certain hideous masculine superiority, that Jane Oliphant’s proud spirit writhed beneath the infliction. She turned on him with blazing eyes.
“What did you say?”
“I said ‘Disgusting!’ ”
“Indeed?”
“I cannot,” said Frederick judicially, “imagine a more deplorable exhibition, and I hope you were sent to bed without any supper.”
“If you ever had to go without your supper,” said Miss Oliphant, who believed in attack as the best form of defence, “it would kill you.”
“Is that so?” said Frederick.
“You’re a beast, and I hate you,” said Miss Oliphant.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that is so.”
“Now, now, now,” said Nurse Wilks. “Come, come, come!”
She eyed the two with that comfortable look of power and capability which comes naturally to women who have spent half a century in dealing with the young and fractious.
“We will have no quarrelling,” she said. “Make it up at once. Master Frederick, give Miss Jane a nice kiss.”
The room rocked before Frederick’s bulging eyes.
“A what?” he gasped.
“Give her a nice big kiss and tell her you’re sorry you quarrelled with her.”
“She quarrelled with me.”
“Never mind. A little gentleman must always take the blame.”
Frederick, working desperately, dragged to the surface a sketchy smile.
“I apologize,” he said.
“Don’t mention it,” said Miss Oliphant.
“Kiss her,” said Nurse Wilks.
“I won’t!” said Frederick.
“What!”
“I won’t.”
“Master Frederick,” said Nurse Wilks, rising and pointing a menacing finger, “you march straight into that cupboard in the passage and stay there till you are good.”
Frederick hesitated. He came of a proud family. A Mulliner had once received the thanks of his Sovereign for services rendered on the field of Crécy. But the recollection of what his brother George had said decided him. Infra dig. as it might be to allow himself to be shoved away in cupboards, it was better than being responsible for a woman’s heart-failure. With bowed head he passed through the door, and a key clicked behind him.
All alone in a dark world that smelt of mice, Frederick Mulliner gave himself up to gloomy reflection. He had just put in about two minutes’ intense thought of a kind which would have made the meditations of Schopenhauer on one of his bad mornings seem like the daydreams of Pollyanna, when a voice spoke through the crack in the door.
“Freddie. I mean Mr. Mulliner.”
“Well?”
“She’s gone into the kitchen to get the jam,” proceeded the voice rapidly. “Shall I let you out?”
“Pray do not trouble,” said Frederick coldly. “I am perfectly comfortable.”
Silence followed. Frederick returned to his reverie. About now, he thought, but for his brother George’s treachery in luring him down to this plague-spot by a misleading telegram, he would have been on the twelfth green at Squashy Hollow, trying out that new putter. Instead of which. …
The door opened abruptly, and as abruptly closed again. And Frederick Mulliner, who had been looking forward to an unbroken solitude, discovered with a good deal of astonishment that he had started taking in lodgers.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, with a touch of proprietorial disapproval.
The girl did not answer. But presently muffled sounds came to him through the darkness. In spite of himself, a certain tenderness crept upon Frederick.
“I say,” he said awkwardly. “There’s nothing to cry about.”
“I’m not crying. I’m laughing.”
“Oh?” The tenderness waned. “You think it’s amusing, do you, being shut up in this damned cupboard. …”
“There is no need to use bad language.”
“I entirely disagree with you. There is every need to use bad language. It’s ghastly enough being at Bingley-on-Sea at all, but when it comes to being shut up in Bingley cupboards. …”
“… with a girl you hate?”
“We will not go into that aspect of the matter,” said Frederick with dignity. “The important point is that here I am in a cupboard at Bingley-on-Sea when, if there were any justice or right-thinking in the world, I should be out at Squashy Hollow. …”
“Oh? Do you still play golf?”
“Certainly I still play golf. Why not?”
“I don’t know why not. I’m glad you are still able to amuse yourself.”
“How do you mean, still? Do you think that just because. …”
“I don’t think anything.”
“I suppose you imagined I would be creeping about the place, a brokenhearted wreck?”
“Oh no. I knew you would find it easy to console yourself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind.”
“Are you insinuating that I am the sort of man who turns lightly from one woman to another—a mere butterfly who flits from flower to flower, sipping … ?”
“Yes, if you want to know, I think you are a born sipper.”
Frederick started. The charge was monstrous.
“I have never sipped. And, what’s more, I have never flitted.”
“That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“What you said.”
“You appear to have a very keen sense of humour,” said Frederick weightily. “It amuses you to be shut up in cupboards. It amuses you to hear me say. …”
“Well, it’s nice to be able to get some amusement out of life, isn’t it? Do you want to know why she shut
