As usual, they were always together and if Hilda did not get the old satisfaction from the company of this polite but aloof little stranger (for so he seemed to her) the change in his attitude made her all the more determined to win him back, and the thought of losing him all the more desolating. She hated the places where they used to play together and wished that Eustace, who was sentimental about his old haunts, would not take her to them. ‘I just want to see it once again,’ he would plead, and she did not like to refuse him, though his new mantle of authority sat so precariously on him. Beneath her moods, which she expressed in so many ways, was a steadily increasing misery; the future stretched away featureless without landmarks; nothing beckoned, nothing drew her on.

Obscurely she realized that the change had been brought about by Miss Fothergill’s money. It had made Eustace independent, not completely independent, not as independent as she was, but it had given a force to his wishes that they never possessed before. It was no good trying to make him not want to go to school; she must make him want to stay at home. In this new state of affairs she believed that if Eustace refused to go to school his father would not try to compel him. But how to go about it? How to make Anchorstone suddenly so attractive, so irresistibly magnetic, that Eustace would not be able to bring himself to leave?

When Eustace told her that Dick Staveley was coming to live at Anchorstone Hall he mentioned this (for him) momentous event as casually as possible. Hilda did not like Dick Staveley, she professed abhorrence of him; she would not go to Anchorstone Hall when Dick had invited her, promising he would teach her to ride. The whole idea of the place was distasteful to her; it chilled and shrivelled her thoughts, just as it warmed and expanded Eustace’s. Even to hear it mentioned cast a shadow over her mind, and as to going there, she would rather die; and she had often told Eustace so.

It was a sign of emancipation that he let Dick’s name cross his lips. He awaited the explosion, and it came.

‘That man!’—she never spoke of him as a boy, though he was only a few years older than she was. ‘Well, you won’t see him, will you?’ she added almost vindictively. ‘You’ll be at school.’

‘Oh,’ said Eustace, ‘that won’t make any difference. I shouldn’t see him anyhow. You see, he never wanted to be friends with me. It was you he liked. If you had gone, I dare say he would have asked me to go too, just as your—well, you know, to hold the horse, and so on.’

‘You and your horses!’ said Hilda, scornfully. ‘You don’t know one end of a horse from the other.’ He expected she would let the subject drop, but her eyes grew thoughtful and to his astonishment she said, ‘Suppose I had gone?’ ‘Oh, well,’ said Eustace, ‘that would have changed everything. I shouldn’t have had time to go to tea with Miss Fothergill—you see we should always have been having tea at Anchorstone Hall. Then she wouldn’t have died and left me her money—I mean, she would have died; but she wouldn’t have left me any money because she wouldn’t have known me well enough. You have to know someone well to do that. And then I shouldn’t be going to school now, because Daddy says it’s her money that pays for me—and now’ (he glanced up, the clock on the Town Hall, with its white face and black hands, said four o’clock) ‘you would be coming in from riding with Dick, and I should be sitting on one of those grand sofas in the drawing-room at Anchorstone Hall, perhaps talking to Lady Staveley.’

Involuntarily Hilda closed her eyes against this picture—let it be confounded! Let it be blotted out! But aloud she said:

‘Wouldn’t you have liked that?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Eustace fervently.

‘Better than going to school?’

Eustace considered. The trussed boy was being carried towards a very large, but slow, fire; other boys, black demons with pitchforks, were scurrying about, piling on coals. His mood of heroism deserted him.

‘Oh yes, much better.’

Hilda said nothing, and they continued to saunter down the hill, past the ruined cross, past the pierhead with its perpetual invitation, towards the glories of the Wolferton Hotel—winter-gardened, girt with iron fire-escapes—and the manifold exciting sounds, and heavy, sulphurous smells, of the railway station.

‘Are we going to Mrs. Wrench’s?’ Eustace asked.

‘No, why should we? We had fish for dinner; you never notice. Oh, I know, you want to see the crocodile.’

‘Well, just this once. You see, I may not see it again for a long time.’

Hilda sniffed. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying that,’ she said. ‘It seems the only thing you can say. Oh, very well, then, we’ll go in and look round and come out.’

‘Oh, but we must buy something. She would be disappointed if we didn’t. Let’s get some shrimps. Aunt Sarah won’t mind just for once, and I don’t suppose I shall have any at St. Ninian’s. I expect the Fourth Form gets them, though.’

‘Why should they?’

‘Oh, didn’t you know, they have all sorts of privileges.’

‘I expect they have shrimps every day at Anchorstone Hall,’ said Hilda, meaningly.

‘Oh, I expect they do. What a pity you didn’t want to go. We have missed such a lot.’

Cautiously they crossed the road, for the wheeled traffic was thick here and might include a motor car. Fat Mrs. Wrench was standing at the door of the fish shop. She saw them coming, went in, and smiled expectantly from behind the counter.

‘Well, Miss Hilda?’

‘Eustace wants a fillet of the best end of the crocodile.’

‘Oh Hilda, I don’t!’

They all laughed uproariously, Hilda loudest of all; while the stuffed crocodile (a small one) sprawling on the wall with tufts of bright green foliage glued round it, glared down on them malignantly. Eustace felt the tremor of delighted terror that he had been waiting for.

‘I’ve got some lovely fresh shrimps,’ said Mrs. Wrench.

‘Turn round, Eustace,’ said Miss Cherrington.

‘Oh must I again, Aunt Sarah?’

‘Yes, you must. You don’t want the other boys to laugh at you, do you?’

Reluctantly, Eustace revolved. He hated having his clothes tried on. He felt it was he who was being criticized, not they. It gave him a feeling of being trapped, as though each of the three pairs of eyes fixed on him, impersonal, fault-finding, was attached to him by a silken cord that bound him to the spot. He tried to restrain his wriggles within himself but they broke out and rippled on the surface.

‘Do try to stand still, Eustace.’

Aunt Sarah was operating; she had some pins in her mouth with which, here and there, she pinched grooves and ridges in his black jacket. Alas, it was rather too wide at the shoulders and not wide enough round the waist.

‘Eustace is getting quite a corporation,’ said his father.

‘Corporation, Daddy?’ Eustace was always interested in words.

‘Well, I didn’t like to say fat.’

‘It’s because you would make me feed up,’ Eustace complained. ‘I was quite thin before. Nancy Steptoe said I was just the right size for a boy.’

No one took this up; indeed, a slight chill fell on the company at the mention of Nancy’s name.

‘Never mind,’ Minney soothed him, ‘there’s some who would give a lot to be so comfortable looking as Master Eustace is.’

‘Would they, Minney?’

Eustace was encouraged.

‘Yes, they would, nasty scraggy things. And I can make that quite all right.’ She inserted two soft fingers beneath the tight line round his waist.

‘Hilda hasn’t said anything yet,’ said Mr. Cherrington. ‘What do you think of your brother now, Hilda?’

Hilda had not left her place at the luncheon table, nor had she taken her eyes off her plate. Without looking up she said:

‘He’ll soon get thin if he goes to school, if that’s what you want.’