Bella instantly threw herself in his arms. “Oh, William!” she cried. “William, _do_ be the kind of husband that won’t throw this up at me when we’re forty and fifty! William, _promise_ me you’ll always say ‘Us’ when I get us in trouble!” And William promised and William did. THE TIGER THE two little girls, Daisy Mears and Elsie Threamer, were nine years old, and they lived next door to each other; but there the coincidence came to an end; and even if any further similarity between them had been perceptible, it could not have been mentioned openly without causing excitement in Elsie’s family. Elsie belonged to that small class of exquisite children seen on canvas in the days when a painter would exhibit without shame a picture called “Ideal Head.” She was one of those rare little fair creatures at whom grown people, murmuring tenderly, turn to stare; and her childhood was attended by the exclamations not only of strangers but of people who knew her well. “Greuze!” they said, or “A child Saint Cecilia!” or “That angelic sweetness!” But whatever form preliminary admiration might take, the concluding tribute was almost always the same: “And so unconscious, with it all!” When some unobservant and rambling-minded person did wander from the subject without mentioning Elsie’s unconsciousness, she was apt to take a dislike to him. People often wondered what that ineffable child with the shadowy downcast eyes was thinking about. They would “give _anything_,” they declared, to know what she was thinking about. But nobody wondered what Daisy Mears was thinking about—on the contrary, people were frequently only too sure they knew what Daisy was thinking about. From the days of her earliest infancy, Elsie, without making any effort, was a child continually noticed and acclaimed; whereas her next neighbour was but an inconspicuous bit of background, which may have been more trying for Daisy than any one realized. No doubt it also helped great aspirations to sprout within her, and was thus the very cause of the abrupt change in her character during their mutual tenth summer. For it was at this time that Daisy all at once began to be more talked about than Elsie had ever been. All over the neighbourhood and even beyond its borders, she was spoken of probably dozens of times as often as Elsie was—and with more feeling, more emphasis, more gesticulation, than Elsie had ever evoked.