Emily obeyed, but her checks were flaming, and when he had gone she threw her head back. "When I'm grown, I mean to have them of my own, and wear them, too," she said. She seemed happier away from home. "Let's go over to your house," she always said. She liked grown people, too, and Uncle Austen once patted her head, and after she had gone said to Aunt Harriet: "A handsome child, an unusually pleasing child." But while Alexina played thus with Emily, more often she trudged across to King William's. The nature of engrossment was different over there. Often as not it was theology, though this, to be sure, was the Captain's word for it, not his son's. Willy's mother, like Aunt Harriet, was a Presbyterian. "If I had been a better one," she lamented to her husband one evening, "I would know how to meet his questions now. You don't take one bit of the responsibility of his religious training, Captain Leroy." The creed of King William's mamma, when she came to formulate it, seemed a stern one, and it lost nothing in its setting forth by reason of her determination to do her duty by her son. "Thank Heaven I had to sit under these things when I was a child, however I hated it then, or I could not do my part by him now," she told the Captain. "I want him," fervently, "to be everything I am not." "Which might," suggested the Captain, "be a prig, you know." But King William, listening, drank in these things. He had a garden patch in the back yard and knew the nature and habits of every vegetable in it, and being strictly a utilitarian, he weeded out sickly plants and unknown cotyledons with a ruthless hand. Alexina expostulated. "Maybe it hurts 'em," she feared. "Maybe it does," said the inexorable William; "but they are like the souls born to be damned. Put 'em on the brush pile there, and after a while we'll burn 'em." At other times the yard was a sea-girt coral reef and they the stranded mariners. Generally Alexina accepted everything. The stories were new to her. But when she did have knowledge of a thing she stood firm; for instance, about the ocean, that you could not land every few moments of your progress and throw out gang-planks. "For I've been there," she insisted, "and you couldn't, you know." At times they adjourned to the commons behind the stable, which, in reality, were plains frequented by Indians, or, if the yard palled or rain drove them in, there was fat, black, plausible Aunt Rose in the basement kitchen to talk to, and if Aunt Rose proved fractious and drove them out, together with her own brood generally skulking around, before a threatening dish-rag or broom, there was Charlotte to be beguiled from more serious occupation into doing her son's bidding.