“Lilias! I thought I could trust you; what have you been doing?” cried Mary. “And Nello?” she added, looking round with dismay at the more important work. Nello had already been roused to that instinctive sense of harm which comes with the arrival of an aggrieved person. But he did not face his victim as Lilias did. He threw down his streaming pencil on the vellum, got down from his chair in the twinkling of an eye, and fled to take shelter with Martuccia, who, ever ready to defend, and yet unaware who was wrong, put an arm round him at once and faced Miss Musgrave with prompt defiance. “Oh Mary!” cried Lilias, trembling, “Nello did not mean it. He is so little. Nello did not know.” Mary was not so angelically sweet as to be indifferent to the damage done, but she had not the freedom of reproof which people exercise with children familiar to them. The little meddlers were still strangers. So she restrained herself and said nothing. She went to the parchment and began to sponge off the still wet colour. Nello kept in his refuge regarding her from afar, ready to bolt behind Martuccia if she made any hostile advances and hide himself in his nurse’s skirt. But Lilias followed Miss Musgrave closely as her shadow. She watched the sponging with the gravest anxious attention. She kept herself close against Mary’s dress, touching it, and put herself in Mary’s way, and interposed her wistful face, now quite pale and troubled, between the vellum and Mary’s eyes. At last her aunt said, perhaps somewhat peevishly, “What do you want, child? You have done harm enough for one morning. Pray go out of my way.” “Have we done much harm?” said Lilias, with strained and anxious eyes. “Yes; you have spoiled my week’s work, you mischievous children,” said Mary, melting a little. “I shall have to do it over again. I did not expect this, Lilias, from you.” “It was very, very bad of me,” said the child, with perfect seriousness, her eyes slowly filling; “but Nello is such a little fellow--he did not know----” “Then why did you do it, Lilias?” The child looked up searchingly into her face. “I think it must have been the devil,” she said, with portentous gravity, drawing a heavy sigh. An impulse of laughter came to Miss Musgrave in the midst of her annoyance; but partly she restrained it for high moral reasons, and partly she was still too much annoyed to give way to laughter. “What do you know about--the devil?” she said. “I think it was your own little mischievous hands, and your curiosity.” “Oh, I know a great deal about him. Mr. Pennithorne told us on Sunday; and Martuccia must be of the same religion as Mr. Pen, for she worships him too,” said Lilias, aware of the advantages of digression when things were so serious as they were now. “Worships him, Lilias! You must not use such words.”