The governess engaged was a distant relative of her own, a Miss Janet Carey. She was an orphan, and had for a year or two been teacher in a boys' preparatory school, limited to thirty pupils. Mrs. Knox wrote to offer her twelve pounds a-year and a "very comfortable home at Rose Villa; to be as one of the family." It must have sounded tempting to Miss Carey after the thirty little boys, and she gratefully accepted it. Mrs. Knox had never seen her; she pictured to herself a tall, bony young woman with weak eyes, for that had been the portrait of her second cousin, Miss Carey's father.
"Crack! crack! Tally-ho! tally-ho!" shouted Dicky, who had completed his whip, and got up to stamp and smack it. "Yo-ho! Tally-ho, tally-ho!"
"Oh, do for goodness' sake be quiet, Dick!" screamed Mrs. Knox. "I can't have that noise now: I told you I had a headache. Do you hear me, then! Mina, come and take away this horrible whip."
Mina came running at the call. Master Dicky was so much given way to as a general rule, that to thwart him seemed to his sisters something delightful. Dicky dodged out of harm's way amongst the shrubs; and Mina was about to go after him, when some one came through the open glass-doors of what was called the garden-room.
Dr. Knox was a tall, strongly built, fair man, looking older than his four-and-twenty years. Nobody could help liking his thin face, for it was a _good_ face, full of sense and thought, but it was not a handsome one. His complexion was sallow, and his light hair had a habit of standing up wild.
"You are home betimes," remarked Mrs. Knox.
"Yes; there was nothing more to do," he answered, sitting down in a rustic garden-chair. "I met James in the pony-chaise: where's he gone?"
"Why, Arnold, don't you know that the governess is coming this evening?" cried the second girl, Lotty, who was fanning her hot face with a cabbage-leaf. "James has gone to the station for her."
"I forgot all about the governess," said Dr. Knox. "Lotty, what a heat you are in!"
"We have been running races," said the child; "and the sun was blazing."
Dicky came tearing up. Something had happened to the whip.
"Look at it, Arnold," he said, throwing his arms and the whip on the doctor's knees. "The lash won't stay on."