‘I HOPE you won’t be lonely, Pussy,’ said Mrs Osbourne, looking into Isobel’s bedroom for a moment on her way to dress for church. ‘I would have stayed at home with you myself if it had not been New Year’s Day. You know how father likes us all to be at church together to begin the New Year, and Claude could not go if I did not, and he would be so disappointed. He had his little red prayer-book laid out before breakfast.’

‘Yes, here it is,’ said Claude, who had come into the room on tiptoe behind his mother, looking like a jolly little Jack Tar in his long blue trousers and new reefer coat, into whose pocket the bright-red prayer-book—a present from his godmother—was squeezed; ‘and I have got markers in at all the places. Ronald put them in.’

‘Ronald is very good to you,’ said his mother. ‘And now that you are such a big boy, and have a prayer-book of your own, you will try and sit quite still, and not fidget in the sermon.’

‘I won’t, if it isn’t very long,’ answered Claude gravely, setting his fat legs wide apart and shaking his head until the wealth of golden curls which covered it bobbed up and down like yellow fluff; ‘but if it gets very tiresome, mother, you must let me move my legs about just a little; they get all prickly if they keep still too long.’

Both Isobel and her mother laughed.

‘He means pins and needles,’ said Isobel. ‘I remember I used to get them if my legs hung down too long.’

‘I will give you two footstools, sir, and then you will have no excuse for fidgeting,’ said Mrs Osbourne; ‘and perhaps, who knows, if you sit very still for the first ten minutes of the sermon there may be a picture somewhere in mother’s prayer-book, which she will let you look at.—But I must be off and get on my bonnet, for the carriage will be round in no time. Good-bye, dearie. I will send Anne up with some story-books for you, although I think it would be better for your head if you lay quite quiet, and did not read.’

Bending down and giving her little daughter a kiss, Mrs Osbourne left the room, followed by Claude; and a few moments afterwards Isobel heard the carriage come round, then the sound of voices and footsteps on the gravel, then the door was shut, and the carriage drove away, and a stillness fell over the house. She felt very drowsy; and when presently a tap came to the door she did not turn her head, but murmured a sleepy ‘Thank you,’ as some one—Anne, she supposed—laid down an armful of books on the little bamboo table at the side of her bed, and stole quietly away.

It was not Anne, however, who had brought them, but Vivian, who had been seized with such a violent fit of coughing at the last moment that he had been left behind. He had clearly caught a little cold; and as it was a beautifully sunny morning, his aunt wisely thought that a sharp run round the garden would be better for him than sitting for an hour and a half in a heated church. Besides, he could run up now and then and see how Isobel was getting on. She charged him not to sit all morning in her room; but she felt that it would not be so lonely for the little girl if she knew that he was at home too.

New Years Day is generally a day of good resolutions. We have turned over a page in our lives, as it were, and the old sheet with its blurs and its blots lies behind us. It cannot be recalled, or changed, no matter what mistakes, or failures, or sins are written upon it; and we turn with relief to the fresh page which lies so stainless, and smooth, and white before us, and we determine that, so far as in us lies, we will fill it with records of more strenuous endeavours after goodness, with fewer blots and rubbed-out lines. It is a solemn call to ‘forget’ the things that are behind, and reach forward to those that are before; and our hearts are dull indeed if we do not respond to it.

Vivian was not slow to feel the influence of the day. He felt that there was so much that he wanted to forget, and he tried, as it were, to turn over this black page of his life and glue it down, forgetting, as so many of us do, that the blots on the old page are apt to show through the paper, and reappear on the nice clean sheet in front of us, unless we have repented of the sins that caused them, and have done everything in our power to repair the trouble and mischief that they have caused.

It was Sunday morning, and he determined to spend it as he thought the old Rector at home would say Sunday morning ought to be spent by a boy who could not go to church; so, after he had carried up the books to Isobel’s room, he went to the schoolroom, and taking down a big illustrated copy of The Children of the Bible, which belonged to Claude, he turned over the pages and tried to settle down to read. But the stories brought with them the thought of his mother, who had read them to Ronald and him when they were younger, and with the thought came the remembrance of the guilty secret which he must carry home with him on Wednesday, and the ugly words ‘Thief’ and ‘Liar’ floated through his brain.

Restlessly he pushed aside the book and wandered to the window. The sun was shining brightly outside, and the hoar-frost on the grass was beginning to melt. Aunt Dora had said that he might go out, and anything was better than hanging about idly, listening to thoughts which he could not silence; so he ran upstairs for his coat and muffler, peeping into Isobel’s room as he passed; but although she was tossing about in her bed she seemed to be asleep, for she took no notice of him.

Outside in the garden all was quiet. The greenhouses were locked up, so were the stables; but Monarch the big black retriever, which was kept as a watch-dog, and was looked after by Mason the coachman, was wide-awake in his kennel in the yard, and allowed the little boy to make friends with him.

For some time he amused himself with the great curly animal, which, although it could bark so fiercely at every errand-boy or beggar who came to the door, was in reality the mildest-tempered dog in the world. Mason’s house adjoined the stables, and presently Mrs Mason appeared. Evidently she was going out for the day, for she wore her best bonnet and cloak, and, after locking the door behind her, she proceeded to hide the key under an old mat on the doorstep, where Mason could find it when he came back with the carriage.

All at once she noticed Vivian, who had run into the kitchen for a piece of stale bread, and was now proceeding to break it into small pieces, and hold them out to Monarch, so as to make him jump the full length of his chain.

‘Please do not give him any more, sir,’ she said. ‘We have had to stop the children giving him scraps. He got so fat and lazy as never was, and Mason couldn’t think what was the matter with him till he found out that little Master Claude had coaxed cook to gather all the bones and broken victuals from the late dinner, and that he used to carry them out and hide them in the straw in the kennel, and then watch to see Monarch hunting for them. Very vexed the poor little kind-hearted gentleman was, too, when he was told that he mustn’t do it; but ’tis true what Mason says, that if a dog is to be a watch-dog it mustn’t have more than two meals a day, given regular, with a bone thrown in once or twice a week as a relish.’

The worthy woman hurried away, afraid that she might miss her bus; and Vivian, finding that the great watch-dog went quietly back to his kennel now that he had no more morsels to offer him, set out to look round the greenhouses, in the hope of finding Joe Flinders the gardener’s boy; but all was quiet and deserted, so he went on to the paddock and amused himself for some time throwing stones at a broken bottle which some one had apparently thrown over from the Heath, and which had lodged in the branches of an elm-tree which stood next the great oak behind the summer-house.

He tried to hit it, but without success, and suddenly he remembered the toy pistol lying hidden in the hole close by.

Dare he take it out and try it?

He hesitated for a moment, and looked all round. Not a soul was in sight, and the house was quite hidden; no one could see him from the windows. The clock on the church tower at the top of the Heath rang out twelve, so he had a full half-hour before any one came out of church. Here was an opportunity for trying, for once, the toy for which he had forfeited so much.

For a moment the thought that it was Sunday held him back, but the temptation was too great. He slipped behind the summer-house, and swung himself into the branches of the oak-tree, and soon he stood on the path again with the parcel in his hand. He had never undone the paper and string in which the pistol and caps were rolled, but he did so now with fingers which trembled, partly through haste, partly through fear of discovery.

The wrappings were off at last, and he fingered the shining little toy lovingly, wondering if after all he dare not smuggle it into the portmanteau and take it home with him. If once he had it there, he thought to himself, there were plenty of places where he could hide it, and no one need know anything about it.

Then he opened the box of caps, and carefully loaded it. He knew the way—Fergus Strangeways had shown him that—and he remembered also that Fergus had told him that his father had said that the pistols were quite safe, for ‘the caps were made up of a pinch of powder and one or two pellets that wouldn’t hurt a baby.’ The thought reassured him as he raised the pistol to his eye, and cocked the trigger in a knowing way. All the same, he felt a little nervous in case there should be a very loud report.

Taking the best aim he could at the broken bottle, he drew the trigger, but a harmless click was all that followed. He tried again and again, but with no better result. Clearly the caps had become damp, in spite of the fact that the parcel had been wrapped in the old ragged cap which he had found in the summer-house. Taking it out, he proceeded to pick a fresh one from the very middle of the box, where it might be drier. Putting the fresh cap in the pistol, he drew the trigger carelessly, half expecting that it would not go off.

But this time the cap was all right, and there was a flash and a sharp report, and then a crash of broken glass.

Deceived by the failure of his first attempts, he had foolishly taken no proper aim, forgetting that the summer-house stood straight in front of him, and the pellets had gone through two of its windows, shivering the glass into a thousand fragments.

There were four panes of glass in the little house, representing, so Isobel had told him, the four seasons, for if one looked through them in order, everything took on a different tint, just as it did in the four seasons of the year. There was green for spring, and deep-red for summer, yellow for autumn, and blue for winter. The children were fond of playing here, and of choosing the colours they liked best, and claiming that window with the seat under it for their own; and Vivian had always chosen the amber yellow, which threw such a warm tint over everything, and made one dream of the mellow days of autumn. Now, however, there was nothing but a hideous gap where the autumn window had been, and Claude’s favourite, the bright green spring one, was utterly destroyed as well.

For a moment Vivian stood rooted to the spot, gazing at the havoc he had wrought with blanched face and great frightened eyes, and then he hastily picked up the piece of brown paper and the ragged cap which were lying at his feet, and crumpled them into a parcel anyhow with the pistol and the caps. If only he could get them hidden away again, he thought in his terror, and steal into the house, perhaps no one would know that he had been out.

To replace them in their hiding-place was easily done, but when, with shaking limbs he had swung himself down from the tree, and was turning to run into the house, the sound of a low cough made him start suddenly and face quickly round again.