When I had flung my last defiance, Philip replied in violent words of a kind which girls in our class of life do not (happily!) use, even in a rage.  They were partly drowned by the clatter with which he dragged his big box across the floor, and filled it with properties of all kinds, from the Dragon to the foot-light reflectors.

“I am going by the 4.15 to the town,” said he, as he pulled the box out towards his own room.  “You need not wait for either Clinton or me.  Pray ‘ring up’ punctually!”

At this moment—­having fully realized the downfall of the theatricals—­Bobby burst into a howl of weeping.  Alice scolded him for crying, and Charles reproached her for scolding him, on the score that her antipathy to Mr. Clinton had driven Philip to this extreme point of insult and ill-temper.

Charles’s own conduct had been so far from soothing, that Alice had abundant material for retorts, and she was not likely to be a loser in the war of words.  What she did say I did not hear, for by that time I had locked myself up in my own room.

CHAPTER IX.

SELF-REPROACH—­FAMILY DISCOMFORT—­OUT ON THE MARSH—­VICTORY.

If I could have locked myself up anywhere else I should have preferred it.  I would have justified my own part in the present family quarrel to Aunt Isobel herself, and yet I would rather not have been alone just now with the text I had made and pinned up, and with my new picture.  However, there was nowhere else to go to.

A restless way I have of pacing up and down when I am in a rage, has often reminded me of the habits of the more ferocious of the wild beasts in the Zoological Gardens, and has not lessened my convictions on the subject of the family temper.  For a few prowls up and down my den I managed to occupy my thoughts with fuming against Philip’s behaviour, but as the first flush of anger began to cool, there was no keeping out of my head the painful reflections which the sight of my text, my picture, and my books suggested—­the miserable contrast between my good resolves and the result.

“It only shows,” I muttered to myself, in a voice about as amiable as the growlings of a panther, “it only shows that it is quite hopeless.  We’re an ill-tempered family—­a hopelessly ill-tempered family; and to try to cure us is like patching the lungs of a consumptive family, I don’t even wish that I could forgive Philip.  He doesn’t deserve it.”

And then as I nursed the cut on my elbow, and recalled the long hours of work at the properties, the damaged scene, the rifling of the green-room, and Philip’s desertion with the Dragon, his probable industry for Mr. Clinton’s theatricals, and the way he had left us to face our own disappointed audience, fierce indignation got the upper hand once more.

“I don’t care,” I growled afresh; “if I have lost my temper, I believe I was right to lose it—­at least, that no one could have been expected not to lose it, I will never beg his pardon for it, let Aunt Isobel say what she will.  I should hate him ever after if I did, for the injustice of the thing.  Pardon, indeed!”