In spring the white horse was turned out into the paddock, where Amabel had begged that he might die comfortably. He lived comfortably instead; and Amabel visited him constantly, and being perfectly fearless would kiss his white nose as he drooped it into her little arms. Her visits to the stable had been discovered and forbidden, but the scandal was even greater when she was found in the paddock, standing on an inverted bucket, and grooming the white horse with Lady Louisa’s tortoise-shell dressing-comb.
“They wouldn’t let me have the currycomb,” said Amabel, who was very hot, and perfectly self-satisfied. Lady Louisa was in despair, but the Squire laughed. The ladies of his family had been great horsewomen for generations.
In the early summer, some light carting being required by the gardener, he begged leave to employ “Miss Amabel’s old horse,” who came at last to trot soberly to the town with a light cart for parcels, when the landlord of the Crown would point him out in proof of the Squire’s sagacity in horse-flesh.
But it was not by her attachment to the cart-horse alone that Amabel disturbed the composure of the head-nurse and of Louise the _bonne_. She was a very Will-o’-the-wisp for wandering. She grew rapidly, and the stronger she grew the more of a Tom-boy she became. Beyond the paddock lay another field, whose farthest wall was the boundary of a little wood,—the wood where Jan had herded pigs. Into this wood it had long been Amabel’s desire to go. But nurses have a preference for the high road, and object to climbing walls, and she had not had her wish. She had often peeped through a hole in the wall, and had smelt honeysuckle. Once she had climbed half way up, and had fallen on her back in the ditch. Louise uttered a thousand and one exclamations when Amabel came home after this catastrophe; and Nurse, distrusting the success of any real penalties in her power, fell back upon imaginary ones.
“I’m sure it’s a mercy you have got back, Miss Amabel,” said she; “for Bogy lives in that wood; and, if you’d got in, it’s ten to one he’d have carried you off.”
“You _said_ Bogy lived in the cellar,” said Amabel.
Nurse was in a dilemma which deservedly besets people who tell untruths. She had to invent a second one to help out her first.