“That she does, in looks and voice, but she could not act here in public.  However, we will lay it before the Mouse-trap.  Was it printed?”

“Lance had enough for the performers struck off.  Francie could send some up.”

“After all,” said Cherie, “the desert island full of savages and wreckers is not more remarkable than the ‘still-vex’d Bermoothes’ getting between Argiers and Sicily.”

“It really was one of the Outer Hebrides,” said Gerald, with the eagerness that belonged to authorship, “so that there could be any amount of Scottish songs.  Prospero is an old Highland chief, who has been set adrift with his daughter-—Francie Vanderkist to wit-—and floated up there, obtaining control over the local elves and brownies.  Little Fely was a most dainty sprite.”

“I am glad you did not make Ariel an electric telegraph,” said his aunt.

“Tempting, but such profanity in the face of Vale Leston was forbidden, and so was the comic element, as bad for the teetotallers.”

“But who were the wreckers?” asked Anna.

“Buccaneers, my dear, singing songs out of the ’Pirate’-— schoolmaster, organist, and choir generally.  They had captured Prospero’s supplanter (he was a Highland chief in league with the Whigs) by the leg, while the exiled fellow was Jacobite, so as to have the songs dear to the feminine mind.  They get wrecked on the island, and are terrified by the elves into releasing Alonso, etc.  Meantime Ferdinand carries logs, forgathers with Miranda and Prospero-—and ends-—” He flourished his hands.

“And it wasn’t acted!”

“No, we were getting it up before Christmas,” said Gerald, “and then-—”

He looked towards Clement, whose illness had then been at the crisis.

“Very inconsiderate of me,” said Clement, smiling, “as the old woman said when her husband did not die before the funeral cakes were stale.  But could it not come off at the festival?”

“Now,” said Gerald, “that the boy is gone, I may be allowed a glass of beer.  Is that absurdity to last on here?”

“Adrian’s mother would not let him come on any other terms,” said Mrs. Grinstead.

“Did she also stipulate that he was never to see a horse?  Quite as fatal to his father.”

“You need not point the unreason, but consider how she has suffered.”

“You go the way to make him indulge on the sly.”

“True, perhaps,” said Clement, “but I mean to take the matter up when I know the poor little fellow better.”

Gerald gave a little shrug, a relic of his foreign ancestry, and Anna proposed a ride to Clipstone to tell Gillian Merrifield of the idea.

“Eh, the dogmatic damsel that came with you the year we had ’Midsummer Night’s Dream’?”

“Yes, sister to Uncle Bernard’s wife.  Do you know Jasper Merrifield?  Clever man.  Always photographing.”

So off they went, Gerald apparently in a resigned state of mind, and came upon dogs and girls in an old quarry, where Mysie had dragged them to look for pretty stones and young ferns to make little rockeries for the sale of work.  ‘The Tempest’ was propounded, and received with acclamation, though the Merrifields declared that they could not sing, and their father would not allow them to do so in public if they could!