A bell rang within the house, and at once young Clara exclaimed:
"Oh! There’s Flossie! Oh, my word, she is late, isn’t she, fardy? What a good thing we didn’t wait tea for her! ... Move up, miss." This to Lucy.
"People who are late must take the consequences, especially little girls," said Albert in reply.
And presently Flossie entered, tripping, shrugging up her shoulders and throwing back her mane, and wonderfully innocent.
"This is Flossie, who is always late," Albert introduced her to Hilda.
"Am I really?" said Flossie, in a very low, soft voice, with a bright and apparently frightened smile.
Dark Flossie was of Amy’s age and supposed to be Amy’s particular friend. She was the daughter of young Clara’s music mistress. The little girl’s prestige in the Benbow house was due to two causes. First she was graceful and rather stylish in movement--qualities which none of the Benbow children had, though young Clara was pretty enough; and second her mother had rather more pupils than she could comfortably handle, and indeed sometimes refused a pupil.
Flossie with her physical elegance was like a foreigner among the Benbows. She had a precocious demeanour. She shook hands and embraced like a woman, and she gave her birthday gift to Bert as if she were distributing a prize. It was a lead-pencil, with a patent sharpener. Bert would have preferred a bicycle, but the patent sharpener made an oasis in his day. His father pointed out to him that as the pencil was already sharpened he could not at present use the sharpener. Amy thereupon furtively passed him the stump of a pencil to operate upon, and then his mother told him that he had better postpone his first sharpening until he got into the garden, where bits of wood would not be untidy. Flossie carefully settled her very short white skirts on a chair, smiling all the time, and enquired about two brothers whom she had been told were to be among the guests. Albert informed her with solemnity that these two brothers were both down with measles, and that Auntie Hamps and Auntie Hilda had come to make up for their absence.
"Poor things!" murmured Flossie sympathetically.
Hilda laughed, and Flossie screwing up her eyes and shrugging up her shoulders laughed too, as if saying: "You and I alone understand me."