They did not know, and even now the name was a name to them and nothing more. Mrs. Gowan evidently took it for granted that even children must have heard of her brother, the famous author.
"So you will help me, won't you, Pauline?" she said appealingly,--"you won't let Max and Muffie run out and talk to them! And if they try to come here you will send them away, won't you, dear?"
Pauline promised her co-operation, though indeed her heart sank at the prospect of seeing her merry little friend Effie day after day as close as the opposite fence and never as much as exchanging chocolates with her.
"To-morrow," said Mrs. Gowan--then she laughed--"but I think he would be afraid to come, don't you, if he knew he was going to have four little rackets like you for such near neighbours. He has come all this way to be perfectly quiet and write his new book."
"I think we'd better stop in the orchard," she said soberly.
Mrs. Gowan kissed her hand to them and went off laughing to her wagonette.
"Well," said Lynn, looking across at "Tenby," "I'm glad it's going to be lived in at last, poor thing. It makes me quite mis'rable to see it standing there in the sun with its eyes shut up tight as if it wanted to wake up on'y it darerunt."
"Like the Sleeping Beauty," said Pauline.
Lynn, in whose composition had run from babyhood a marked vein of poetry, shook her hair back from her face.
"I made a song about it down at the waterfall the other day," she said. "Only mamma wasn't here to write it down, and I didn't know if you could spell all the words, Paul."
"What nonsense!" said Paul, "as if I couldn't spell any word a child like you could think of."
"Well, write it then," urged Lynn, "and I can send it in my next letter to mamma; the rhyums in it came quite right this time."
So Pauline, having nothing better to do, and anxious to display her spelling prowess, fished out of her pocket a bit of pencil and one of Octavius Smith's trade cards that drew attention to his prime line of bacon. This last Larkin had pressed upon her that very morning, and urged her to put it on the mantelpiece, where their visitors could see it. They owed him a return. Morning after morning did he, after receiving his orders from Miss Bibby at the kitchen door, ride his horse to the road at one side of the house, where some well-grown pines made a kindly screen, and there let the children, one after the other, have all the delights of a stolen ride. The ever-present dread of Miss Bibby's discovery naturally added a fearful joy to the proceedings "A judge's eldest daughter astride a grocer's horse!" Pauline could readily imagine the lady's tone of horror.