stealthily downstairs: something seemed to be calling to her.
Silently--"like a thief in the night," to adopt Mrs. Munday's
metaphor--had slipped the heavy bolts; had joined the thousand creatures
of the wood--had danced and leapt and shouted; had behaved, in short,
more as if she had been a Pagan nymph than a happy English child. She
had regained the house unnoticed, as she thought, the Devil, no doubt,
assisting her; and had hidden her wet clothes in the bottom of a mighty
chest. Deceitfulness in her heart, she had greeted Mrs. Munday in sleepy
tones from beneath the sheets; and before breakfast, assailed by
suspicious questions, had told a deliberate lie. Later in the morning,
during an argument with an active young pig who was willing enough to
play at Red Riding Hood so far as eating things out of a basket was
concerned, but who would not wear a night-cap, she had used a wicked
word. In the afternoon she "might have killed" the farmer's only son and
heir. They had had a row. In one of those sad lapses from the higher
Christian standards into which Satan was always egging her, she had
pushed him; and he had tumbled head over heels into the horse-pond. The
reason, that instead of lying there and drowning he had got up and walked
back to the house howling fit to wake the Seven Sleepers, was that God,
watching over little children, had arranged for the incident taking place
on that side of the pond where it was shallow. Had the scrimmage
occurred on the opposite bank, beneath which the water was much deeper,
Joan in all probability would have had murder on her soul. It seemed to
Joan that if God, all-powerful and all-foreseeing, had been so careful in
selecting the site, He might with equal ease have prevented the row from
ever taking place. Why couldn't the little beast have been guided back
from school through the orchard, much the shorter way, instead of being
brought round by the yard, so as to come upon her at a moment when she
was feeling a bit short-tempered, to put it mildly? And why had God
allowed him to call her "Carrots"? That Joan should have "put it" this