To-morrow morning came all too soon. A pleasant letter from Aunt Grace arrived at breakfast-time, containing a warm invitation for Punch to take up his abode at Woodsleigh, which was a great relief and pleasure to the rest of the party, but otherwise the day was a trying one. Mary went about with a duster swathed round her head, as she always did during the spring-cleaning, and there was a general feeling of bustle and discomfort. The children wandered restlessly from room to room, trying to help, but usually only succeeded in being in the way, and secretly they rather longed for the cab which was to take them to the station in time for the 11.35 train.

The cab came at last, and less than a quarter of an hour later they found themselves installed with Punch and endless baggage in a second-class railway carriage, while Mary stood on the platform smiling bravely. Another few minutes, and the train was starting with a shriek and a pant. All three children leaned out of the window, waving[12] frantically, till the line curved round a corner and Mary and her fluttering handkerchief were lost to sight. After that it was Punch who saved the situation. All his journeys to the seaside had failed to accustom him to railway travelling, and he now took refuge under the seat, looking so cowed and miserable that nobody could think of anything but how to comfort and reassure him. They were so much occupied with this as to be quite taken by surprise at reaching their destination in what seemed an astonishingly short time.

The only people waiting on Woodsleigh platform were a lad who served both as porter and ticket-collector and Aunt Grace herself—an Aunt Grace who looked wonderfully young and pretty to be aunt and guardian to such a big girl as Emmeline. She was, in fact, very much what her niece Kitty might become a few years hence when transformed from a tomboy into a fashionable, grown-up young lady. She hurried forward to open the carriage door for the children, and greeted the whole party, including Punch, with such frank delight at seeing them that not even Emmeline could help being charmed, and a limpet-like twin was soon clinging to either side of her in a devoted, if rather inconvenient, fashion.

‘We shall have to leave the boxes to be brought up by the milk-cart in the course of the afternoon,’[13] explained Aunt Grace when the luggage had all been taken out of the train. ‘We’re very primitive at Woodsleigh, and the milk-cart’s the only thing we can boast of in the way of a public conveyance. It won’t come till later on in the afternoon, but I can lend brushes and sponges, so I hope you’ll be able to manage all right till then.’

‘We did wash our hands just before coming, and Mary brushed all our hairs,’ Micky was careful to assure her, ‘so you needn’t trouble to lend us things. But thank you all the same,’ he added hastily, for fear of hurting her feelings.

‘Micky, you know Mary always makes us wash our hands and faces after railway journeys!’ said Emmeline—a remark which Micky, who was just then stooping down to undo Punch’s lead, found it convenient not to hear.

‘I hope before long to get a donkey and donkey-cart of our own,’ observed Aunt Grace as they left the station and came out into a village street; ‘then we shan’t have to depend on the milk-cart, and it will be much more convenient altogether.’

‘Oh, Aunt Grace, how lovely!’ exclaimed Kitty, giving a joyous little skip. ‘Donkeys are such dears!’

‘I shall ride ours bare-back,’ announced Micky, ‘and teach him all sorts of tricks.’

‘I’m always so glad to think of a donkey having[14] a good home,’ said Emmeline; ‘people are so cruel to them sometimes. When we stayed at the seaside, it often made us quite sad to see how they were ill-treated.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Aunt Grace; ‘it is very sad. Two or three years ago I was staying at the seaside with some children, who made a special point of hiring the ones with unkind masters for extra long rides, and never letting them be whipped, so as to give them a rest from being ill-treated.’

‘I wish I knew those nice children,’ said Kitty.

‘And I expect they found the donkeys really went quite as well, didn’t they, Aunt Grace?’ asked Emmeline, who had not yet learned that virtue often has to be its own reward.

‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t say they did,’ owned Aunt Grace with a little twinkle in her eye; ‘at the best of times they went at a slow and stately pace somewhat resembling a funeral procession, and at the worst of times they sat down comfortably in the middle of the road and refused to budge. Still, I don’t doubt that if my friends had had the bringing up of those donkeys from the first, they would have gone all right without being beaten. It was simply that the poor creatures had got so used to it that they didn’t understand anything else.’

‘Aren’t we nearly at your house?’ asked Kitty[15] presently; ‘we seem getting quite outside the village now.’

‘No, we have still about ten minute’s walk before we get to Fir-tree Cottage,’ replied Aunt Grace; ‘it stands right away from other houses, just outside a large wood. It’s very nice in most ways being quite out of the village, for it makes one so much freer to do just as one likes, but it’s rather inconvenient sometimes being so far from the station. It’s really not so very much farther to Chudstone Station—the one you passed next before Woodsleigh; indeed, when I have plenty of time, I sometimes start from there instead of from Woodsleigh, for it makes a delightful walk through the wood.’

‘How jolly to live in a cottage and so near a wood!’ cried Kitty, giving another little skip.

‘As to living in a cottage, I’m afraid you won’t find it quite your idea of one,’ said Aunt Grace, ‘though it really was one before grandfather built on the front part of the house. The wood’s real enough though, and begins only just outside our back-garden gate, which is very charming of it.’

‘I thought grandfather was a Professor,’ remarked Micky, looking puzzled.

‘Why, so he was,’ said Aunt Grace.

‘But if he built the front part of the house he must have been a stone-mason, like Mary’s brother,’ objected Micky.

[16]

‘Aunt Grace didn’t mean that he built it with his own hands, you silly child!’ said Emmeline, laughing.

‘But I don’t wonder Micky thought I did,’ said Aunt Grace kindly; ‘it was very natural.’

Aunt Grace was right in saying that Fir-tree Cottage was not the kind of cottage to which the children were used. It was what they considered quite a large house, standing well back from the road among lawns and shrubberies, and when they walked in at the front door they found themselves, not in the poky little passage that Kitty had been picturing to herself from her remembrances of seaside lodgings, but in a hall as large as the one at their old home, and far more charming, for it was bright with ferns and flowering plants and cosy with cushioned seats and lion-skin rugs. In this hall they were met by a rather austere-looking person whom Aunt Grace called Jane.

‘Jane was my nurse when I was a little girl,’ she said, ‘so we are very old friends, and now she is going to help look after you;’ at which Jane smiled grimly, and Emmeline thought how horrid it would be to have her to look after them instead of kind, gentle Mary.

‘Now, we must certainly take Punch to be introduced to Cook,’ said Aunt Grace; ‘she’s a splendid person for animals.’

[17]

This introduction was so successful that Emmeline forgot all disagreeable impressions. Cook was found in her bright airy kitchen with its red-tiled floor and rows of shining dish-covers, and she and Punch seemed quite delighted with one another. ‘That’s a rare nice little dog,’ she kept saying as he smelt round her skirts with marked approval. ‘Have you shown them the kennel, miss?’ she added. ‘I give that a good scrubbing yesterday as soon as ever I heard he was coming, so that will be all nice and fresh for him now. There’s clean straw in too.’

‘We must go and admire it,’ said Aunt Grace, and they went through the scullery and out into the back-yard, in one corner of which was an enormous dog-kennel.

‘The last dog who lived here was a St. Bernard,’ explained Aunt Grace, ‘so Punch will find his quarters very roomy ones.’

‘Aunt Grace, you aren’t going to keep him chained up except when he goes for walks, are you?’ asked Kitty.

‘Why, of course not,’ said Aunt Grace; ‘this is his private bedroom, that’s all, and I no more expect him to stay here all day than I shall expect you to stay in your bedrooms.’

This so greatly relieved the children that they were in a mood to be delighted with everything when Aunt Grace led them upstairs to show[18] them their own bedrooms. She took them first to the room which the two girls were to share, and they both exclaimed at the sight of its dainty white-painted furniture and fresh muslin hangings. In each half of the room was a little white bed, a white wash-hand stand, and a white chest of drawers with a looking-glass standing on the top of it.

‘It’s quite like grand grown-up ladies, both of us having a wash-stand and a dressing-table to ourselves,’ said Kitty, with much satisfaction; ‘there was only one of each in the night-nursery at home.’

‘They are such pretty ones, too,’ said Emmeline. ‘I do love white enamel.’

‘I’m very glad you like them,’ said Aunt Grace, looking pleased; ‘I always think one has so much more heart in keeping one’s room tidy if the furniture’s nice.’

‘Yes, you won’t have to leave your things about here, Kitty,’ remarked Emmeline, in her elder-sisterly way.

Kitty was not listening; she had rushed to the window. ‘I do believe—yes, you really can just see the sea!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Aunt Grace, may we go there every day?’

‘I’m afraid it’s rather too far off to go there every day,’ said Aunt Grace; ‘it’s a good five miles. Still, I hope we shall be able to go there[19] quite often—at all events when we’ve got our donkey-cart.’

There was a door between the girls’ room and the next, which Aunt Grace pointed out to them. ‘My room is the next,’ she said, ‘so you’ll be able to run in for any help you want. Jane will come in and do your hair in the mornings, but of course she won’t always be there for the odds and ends of things that need doing.’

‘I’ve done my own hair for quite a long time,’ Emmeline was careful to inform her.

Aunt Grace did not seem much impressed. ‘That’s a good thing,’ she observed cheerfully.

They went to Micky’s room after that. They had to cross the passage and go down some steps in order to reach it, for it was in the part of the house which had been the original Fir-tree Cottage, where the rooms were all much lower—like cottage rooms in fact. There were but two of them on the upstairs floor, and the other one was to be the schoolroom. Underneath these two rooms were two others, now used as the scullery and larder. Micky’s room was not quite so daintily furnished as his sisters’, but it had a delightful view out on to the lawn and wood beyond, which made it a very pleasant one. What especially gratified Micky, however, was its being alone. ‘You need a man to sleep in this part of[20] the house,’ he remarked; ‘burglars would be sure to choose it to attack, because they’d think there would be fewer people to shoot them, so it’s a jolly good thing it’s me you’ve put here, and not the girls.’

‘Micky always sleeps with his gun at the foot of his bed, just in case,’ said Kitty.

Just at that moment the dinner-bell rang.

‘Well, I must run and get ready,’ said Aunt Grace. ‘Can I lend anybody anything?’

‘Thank you; we should be very grateful for a sponge,’ said Emmeline, ‘and, Aunt Grace, Micky must wash, mustn’t he? Just look at his hands!’

Micky made a face at her, and Aunt Grace said calmly: ‘I expect he will wash: gentlemen usually do. But I feel it’s a question we must leave to himself—at all events till his luggage comes.’

Emmeline flushed crimson. Then a choky feeling came into her throat; her eyes began to sting, and she had to hurry out of the room lest she should burst out crying. It was not only that she was hurt for herself, but her sense of loyalty was grieved. Mary had always made Micky wash his hands before dinner. It would always be like this, she said to herself. The others would leave off all the good ways they had been taught, and whenever Emmeline, the only[21] one who would never forget, tried to remind them, Aunt Grace would snub her.

The chokiness and the stinging gradually passed off, and Emmeline could trust her voice again.

‘Kitty, you really needn’t have gone and told Aunt Grace about our only having one wash-stand and dressing-table at home,’ she snapped, as they were washing their hands.

‘Why ever not?’ asked Kitty, opening her eyes.

‘It makes us seem such babies,’ said Emmeline, crossly; ‘and, though of course you and Micky are babies, it’s rather hard on me.’

Fortunately Kitty was both sweet-tempered and tactful, so she made no answer, and the subject dropped. Emmeline, however, went down to the dining-room in anything but a good temper. Even the sight of Micky with spotlessly clean face and hands failed to soothe her; it was exactly like Micky to go and wash his hands just in order to make her seem in the wrong.

‘I think this clock is a little bit slow,’ said Aunt Grace, after a few minutes of eager chatter on the twins’ part and silence on Emmeline’s, which an onlooker might have described as sulky, but which she herself considered dignified. ‘Would you mind telling me the right time by that lovely little watch of yours, Emmeline?’

[22]

Wily Aunt Grace! That little gold watch which had been given her by her mother was the pride and joy of Emmeline’s heart. Nothing so delighted her as to be asked the time. She gave the required information with the utmost graciousness; the dining-room clock was exactly three minutes slow, it seemed, by the right time. Aunt Grace actually left her seat then and there and went to the mantelpiece to move on the minute-hand three spaces, and Emmeline began to wonder whether a person who cared so much about the right time, and showed such a proper amount of faith in her gold watch, could be so very worldly after all!

The children and Aunt Grace were just setting out for an exploring expedition in the wood after dinner when Emmeline suddenly felt Micky, who was walking by her side a little behind the others, press a hot, sticky coin into her hand.

‘Why, what is it?’ she asked, with a wonder which did not grow less when she discovered that it was a penny.

‘It’s to make up for making that face,’ said Micky, who had grown very red. ‘It was beastly rude of me, but for the moment I had quite forgotten about you being a girl.’

KITTY GAVE SUCH A BOUND OF DELIGHT THAT SHE NEARLY UPSET HER TEA.
 
‘Micky darling,’ said Emmeline, so much touched and ashamed that the tears quite came into her eyes this time, ‘I really can’t take your penny. Besides, it was all my fault for interfering.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Micky stoutly. ‘And anyhow, please do take it. I shan’t feel a gentleman again till you do. Perhaps,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘you might spend it on some marbles. I’ve lost so many of mine down the mouse-hole and other places that there really aren’t enough now when Kitty wants to play too, and perhaps if you had some of your own you wouldn’t mind lending them us sometimes. But don’t, of course, get them unless you like; it’s only a suggestion.’