While Dacre wriggled, his sister lay quite still on her back with her legs stretched out, and with a considerable reach of stocking visible between the edge of her frock and her shoes. She had one arm curled round her neck with the sharp elbow stuck out uncompromisingly in Dacre’s direction. It was useful as a buffer and saved her many a lunge. The other hand held a book, a queer old edition of Elia, which she was deeply sunk in until she fell to watching Dacre with a look of curious mockery on her red curled lips. “I’d give my eyes to go to school!” burst out the boy after an interval of comparative silence. Mutterings never counted in Dacre. “So you have said six times this afternoon, not to mention the mutters,” said the girl, “what do you want to go to school for?” “You know without any telling.” “I want to hear again.” “To jeer at a fellow, I suppose?” “I won’t jeer, and I might help you,” she said with a laugh. He looked at her face dubiously, it was inscrutable enough, but the mockery had left her lips. “I want to go, I hate to be here, Greggs is a big enough fool but not quite so much as the others, he ain’t all bad, I’ll say that. But what’s he to other boys and cricket and football and larks—oh, you know!” “I wonder why on earth they let you read _Tom Brown_ when such heaps of books are forbidden,” said Gwen reflectively. “They have brought all this on themselves,” she added, knitting her brows in the exact manner of her mother. “We have to bear what we earn, we hear that often enough, I don’t see why they shouldn’t apply it to themselves. Dacre, you’re an awful ass, if I wanted all those things I should have had them long ago.” “All very well to say that,” grunted the boy, “I’d like to know how.” “I’ll tell you,—I’d worry till I got them.” “I worry pretty well as it is,” he said with a self-satisfied grin. “Yes, in a stupid squally way—you get into a rage and make a row and an ass of yourself generally, then you get punished and repent, or pretend to,—anyway nothing is heard of you till the next bout. You might be a dead cat for all the importance you are—of course you’re forgotten, and they go on working in peace. “Now if I wanted a thing and wanted it badly I should take good care never to be forgotten; I should let them see there was to be no peace as long as I was in the house; I should make myself felt from the garrets to the kitchen; I should gain my end,” she concluded with calm finality. By this time the sun had forsaken their tree and had flickered on to one nearer the west, and in the evening light her face gleamed out almost ghastly in its pallor. “Gwen, you’re queerer and queerer! Why don’t you do all this for yourself? You are quiet enough now, nothing only sulky, why don’t you do what you say I ought to, yourself?” “For what?” was the sharp retort. “I don’t want boys and cricket and football and larks.” “What do you want then?”