She was considering whether it would not be courteous to knock at Miss Gascoigne’s door, and ask if she too were ready, when she heard a loud outcry in the nursery above.  This, alas! was no novelty.  More than once Christian had rushed wildly up stairs, expecting some dreadful catastrophe, but it was only the usual warfare between Phillis and the children, especially Arthur, who was no longer a baby to be petted and scolded, or a little girl to be cowed into obedience, but a big boy to be ruled, if at all, vi et armis—­as Mrs. Grey had more than once suspected Phillis did rule.

“I wont!  I won’t! and you shan’t make me!” was the fierce scream which caught her ear before she entered the nursery door.

There stood Phillis, her face red with passion, grasping Arthur with one hand, and beating him with the other, while the boy, holding on to her with the tenacity of a young bull-dog, was, with all the might of his little fists, returning blow for blow—­in short, a regular stand-up fight, in which the two faces, elder and younger, woman and child, were alike in obstinacy and fury.  No wonder at Titia’s sullenness or Atty’s storms of rage.  The children only learned what they were taught.

“Phillis, what is the matter?  What has the boy done amiss?”

Phillis turned round with the defiant look which she assumed every time Mrs. Grey entered the nursery, only a little harder, a little fiercer, with the black brows bent, and the under-hung mouth almost savage in its expression.

“What has he done, ma’am? he has disobeyed me.  I’ll teach you to do it again, you little villain you!”

“Phillis!”

Never before had Phillis’s new mistress addressed her in that tone; it made her pause a second, and then her blows fell with redoubled strength on the shrinking shoulders, even the head, of the frantic, furious boy.

Now there was one thing which in all her life Christian never could stand, and that was, to see a child beaten, or in any way ill used.  The tyranny which calls itself authority, the personal revenge which hides under the name of punishment, and both used, cowardly, by the stronger against the weaker, were, to her keen sense of justice, so obnoxious, so detestable that they always roused in her a something, which is at the root of all the righteous rebellions in the world—­a something which God, who ordained righteous authority, implants in every honest human heart as a safeguard against authority unrighteous and therefore authority no longer.  If Christian had been a mother, and seen the father of her own children beating one of them in the way Phillis beat Arthur, it would have made her, as she was wont to say, with a curious flash of her usually quiet eyes, “dangerous.”

She wasted no words.  It was not her habit.  She merely with her firm, strong hand, wrenched the victim out of the oppressor’s grasp.

“Arthur, go to my room.  I will hear what you have done amiss.  Phillis, remember, henceforward no children in my house shall be struck or punished except by their father or myself.”