Match Pair by Patience McElwee

Author:Patience McElwee [McElwee, Patience]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jane Badger Books

to which Father added,

“Double, double, toil and trouble,

Two things stand like stone:

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in one’s own,

which put together meant I ought to go and see if I could help to clean up, back Diana Jardine in her errand of mercy, and stop myself being homesick for Stone House, missing Adam, and wishing I hadn’t taken all Uncle William’s money.

Jeremy Barnes was the same fat little boy I had seen before. He was sitting on a bale of straw with his pony beside him all tangled up in its reins, and if the Atomy hadn’t just been in jeering at him I should have been very much surprised. I heard her say soppy idiot before she darted off on another of her punitive raids to point out to people bigger than herself what they were doing wrong.

Miss Jardine sat down beside him after giving me the job of looking after the pony and asked him what was the matter. Mrs Allibone, who had insisted on coming with us though I was sure she could have been less harmfully employed elsewhere, said: “Too many sweets, I expect, eh, Jeremy?” as if she were accusing her late, though I didn’t think particularly lamented, husbands of having had too much to drink.

“I didn’t eat any breakfast,” he said mournfully, which of course was a perfectly good explanation to anyone except someone like Mrs Allibone who prided herself on being good with children.

Miss Jardine offered him the sandwiches, deaf, I was glad to observe, to Mrs Allibone’s suggestion of a good dose of bicarb. I wondered how soon it would be necessary for her to say to Mrs Allibone “Who’s running this camp, you or me?” and if she would have enough courage to do it.

Some people are apt to jeer at spinsters, saying they go in for good works because they can’t get husbands, going on to say look at the suffragette movement—they only wanted Votes for Women because they hadn’t got a man at home to influence—but looking at Miss Jardine one could hardly class her as a spinster. I thought of spinsters, or old maids, as being about eighty, with blue spectacles and elastic-sided boots and pet canaries or pugs, with comfits for good children and good advice for bad ones, but perhaps it was true that Miss Jardine had taken on the Pony Club because she couldn’t get Uncle William, since I was sure her heart wasn’t really in it. If it had been she would have been out enjoying the fun, if you could call it that, of everybody’s arrival, instead of being stuck in a schoolroom handing out tea which she could equally have done at the Women’s Institute.

Jeremy soon stopped looking green and was well enough to be reproved, quite gently, for having left a pitchfork in the stable with the pony, and Mrs Allibone, cross with herself for not having noticed the pitchfork first, said, over his head: “No father, that’s the trouble. No one to put the fear of God into him over details.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.