"Though I know he is troublesome sometimes--but I think
it was too much. His body is covered with marks."
Mr. Harby stood sturdy and unmoved, waiting now to have done,
with the twinkling, tiny wrinkles of an ironical smile at the
corners of his eyes. He felt himself master of the
situation.
"And he was violently sick. I couldn't possibly send him to
school to-day. He couldn't keep his head up."
Yet she had no answer.
"You will understand, sir, why he is absent," she said,
turning to Mr. Harby.
"Oh, yes," he said, rough and off-hand. Ursula detested him
for his male triumph. And she loathed the woman. She loathed
everything.
"You will try to have it remembered, sir, that he has a weak
heart. He is so sick after these things."
"Yes," said the headmaster, "I'll see about it."
"I know he is troublesome," the woman only addressed herself
to the male now--"but if you could have him punished
without beating--he is really delicate."
Ursula was beginning to feel upset. Harby stood in rather
superb mastery, the woman cringing to him to tickle him as one
tickles trout.
"I had come to explain why he was away this morning, sir. You
will understand."
She held out her hand. Harby took it and let it go, surprised
and angry.
"Good morning," she said, and she gave her gloved, seedy hand
to Ursula. She was not ill-looking, and had a curious
insinuating way, very distasteful yet effective.
"Good morning, Mr. Harby, and thank you."
The figure in the grey costume and the purple hat was going
across the school yard with a curious lingering walk. Ursula
felt a strange pity for her, and revulsion from her. She
shuddered. She went into the school again.
The next morning Williams turned up, looking paler than ever,
very neat and nicely dressed in his sailor blouse. He glanced at
Ursula with a half-smile: cunning, subdued, ready to do as she
told him. There was something about him that made her shiver.
She loathed the idea of having laid hands on him. His elder
brother was standing outside the gate at playtime, a youth of
about fifteen, tall and thin and pale. He raised his hat, almost
like a gentleman. But there was something subdued, insidious
about him too.
"Who is it?" said Ursula.
"It's the big Williams," said Violet Harby roughly.
"She was here yesterday, wasn't she?"
"Yes."
"It's no good her coming--her character's not good
enough for her to make any trouble."
Ursula shrank from the brutality and the scandal. But it had
some vague, horrid fascination. How sordid everything seemed!
She felt sorry for the queer woman with the lingering walk, and
those queer, insidious boys. The Williams in her class was wrong
somewhere. How nasty it was altogether.