middle of the table, just where the boys were wont to look for refections of fruit or cake when they tumbled in from school. Six boys and Babie hovered round, each in the act of devouring a golden-green, egg-like plum, and only two or three remained in the leaves at the bottom!
“Oh, the magnum bonums!” she cried; and Janet came rushing out in dismay at the sound, standing aghast, but not exclaiming.
“Weren’t they for us?” asked Bobus, the first to get the stone out of his mouth.
“No; oh, no!” answered his mother, as well as laughter would permit; “they are your aunt’s precious plums, which she gave us as a great favour, and I was going to be so good and learn to preserve and pickle them! Oh, dear!”
“Never mind, Mother Carey,” mumbled her nephew Johnny, with his stone swelling out his cheek, where it was tucked for convenience of speech; “I’ll go and get you another jolly lot more.”
“You can’t,” grunted Robin; “they are all gathered.”
“Then we’ll get them off the old tree at the bottom of the orchard, where they are just as big and yellow, and mamma will never know the difference.”
“But they taste like soap!”
“That doesn’t matter. She’d no more taste a magnum bonum, before it is all titivated up with sugar, than—than—than—”
“Babie’s head with brain sauce,” gravely put in Bobus, as his cousin paused for a comparison. “It’s a wasting of good gifts to make jam of these, for jam is nothing but a vehicle for sugar.”
“Then the grocer’s cart is jam,” promptly retorted Armine, “for I saw a sugarloaf come in one yesterday.”
“Come on, then,” cried Jock, ripe for the mischief; “I know the tree! They are just like long apricots. Aunt Ellen will think her plums have been all a-growing!”
“No, no, boys!” cried his mother, “I can’t have it done. To steal your aunt’s own plums to deceive her with!”
“We always may do as we like with that tree,” said Johnny, “because they are so nasty, and won’t keep.”
“How nice for the preserves!” observed Bobus.
“They would do just as well to hinder Mother Carey from catching it.”
“No, no, boys; I ought to ‘catch it!’ It was all my fault for not putting the plums away.”
“You won’t tell of us,” growled Robin, between lips that he opened wide enough the next moment to admit one of three surviving plums.
“If I tell her I left them about in the boys’ way, she will arrive at the natural conclusion.”
“Do they call those things magnum bonum?” asked Janet, as the boys drifted away.
“Yes,” said her mother, looking at her rather wonderingly; and adding, as Janet coloured up to the eyes, “My dear, have you any other association with the name?”
Many a time Janet had longed to tell all she knew; now, when so good an opportunity had come, all was choked back by the strange leaden weight of reserve, and shame in that long reserve.
She opened her eyes and stared as stupidly at her mother as Robin could have done, feeling an utter incapacity of making any reply; and Caroline, who had for a moment thought she understood, was baffled, and durst not pursue the subject for fear of betraying her own secret, deciding within herself that Janet might have caught up the word without understanding.
They were interrupted the next minute, and Janet ran away, feeling that she had had an escape, yet wishing she had not.
Caroline did effectually shelter her nephews under her general term “the boys,” and if their mother was not conciliated, their fellow-feeling with her was strengthened, as well as their sense of honour. Nay, Johnny actually spent the next half-holiday in walking three miles and back to his old nurse, whom he beguiled out of a basket of plums—hard, little blue things, as unlike magnum bonums as could well be, but which his aunt received as they were meant, as full compensation; nay, she took the pains to hunt up a recipe, and have them well preserved, in hopes of amazing his mother.
It was indeed one difficulty that the two sisters-in-law had such different notions of the aim and end of economy. The income at Kencroft had not increased with the family, which numbered eight, for there were two little boys in the nursery, and it was only by diligent housewifery that Mrs. Brownlow kept up the somewhat handsome establishment she had started with at her marriage. Caroline felt that she neither could nor would have made herself such a slave to domestic details; yet this was life and duty and interest to Ellen. Where one sister would be unheeding of shabby externals, so that all her children might be free and on an equality, if they did not go beyond her, in all enjoyments, physical, artistic, or intellectual; the other toiled to keep up appearances, kept her children under restraint and in the background, and made all sorts of unseen sacrifices to the supposed duty of always having a handsome dinner for whomsoever the Colonel might bring in, and keeping the horses, carriages, and servants that she thought his due.
But then Ellen had a husband, and, as Caroline sighed to herself, that made all the difference! and she was no Serene Highness, and had no dignity.
The three girls from Kencroft did actually become pupils at the Folly, but the beginnings were not propitious, for, in her new teacher’s eyes, Jessie knew nothing accurately, but needed to have her foundations looked to—to practise scales, draw square boxes, and work the four first rules of arithmetic.
“Simple things,” complained Jessie to her mother, “that I used to do when I was no bigger than Essie, and yet she is always teasing one about how and why! She wanted me to tell why I carried one.”
“Have a little patience for the present, my dear, your papa wants to help her just at present, and after this autumn we will manage for you to have some real good music lessons.”
“But I don’t like wasting time over old easy things made difficult,” sighed Jessie.
“It is very tiresome, my dear; but your papa wishes it, and you see, poor thing, she can’t teach you more than she knows herself; and while you are there, I am sure it is all right with Essie and Ellie.”
“She does not teach them a bit like Miss James,” said Jessie. “She makes their sums into a story, and their spelling lessons too. It is like a game.”
Indeed, Essie and Ellie were so willing to go off to their lessons every morning, that their mother often thought it could not be all right, and that the progress, which they undoubtedly made, must be by some superficial trick; but as their father had so willed it, she submitted to the present arrangement, deciding that “poor Caroline was just able to teach little children.”
The presence of Essie and Ellie much assisted in bringing Babie back to methodical habits; nor was she, in spite of her precocious intelligence, too forward in the actual drill of education to be able to work with her little cousins.
The incongruous elements were the two elder girls, who could by no means study together, since they were at the two opposite ends of the scale; but as Jessie was by no means aggressive, being in fact as sweet and docile a shallow girl as ever lived, things went on peaceably, except when Janet could not conceal her displeasure that Bobus would not share her contempt for Jessie’s intellect.
If she
