Possibly John realised the truth of this defiance. He administered a
final thump on what he believed to be Christian's biceps, and released
her.

"Pretty rotten to spoil the game, and then tell lies," he said, with
severity.

"I don't tell lies," said Christian, flitting like a gnat to the open
window of the schoolroom. "You sang the wrong verse! It ought to have
been '_hear_ them,' and I _do_!"

Having thus secured the last word, Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry, aged
nine in years, and ninety in spirit, sprang upon the window-sill,
leapt lightly into a flower-bed, and betook herself to the resort most
favoured by her, the kennels of her father's hounds.

What person is there who, having attained to such maturity as is
required for legible record, shall presume to reconstruct, either from
memory or from observation, the mind of a child? Certain mental
attitudes may be recalled, certain actions predicated in certain
circumstances, but the stream of the mind, with its wayward currents,
its secret eddies, flows underground, and its course can only be
guessed at by tokens of speech and of action, that are like the
rushes, and the yellow king-cups, and the emerald of the grass, that
show where hidden waters run. Nothing more presumptuous than the
gathering of a few of these tokens will here be attempted, and of
these, only such as may help to explain the time when these children,
emerging from childhood, began to play their parts in the scene
destined to be theirs.