He misinterpreted her silence.

“I have no right to speak to you like this, because my life has been any colour but white—­that is it, isn’t it, Miss Meg?” he said with great sadness.

Meg dropped her sheltering hands.

“Oh, no,” she said, “oh! how can you think so?  It is only I am so horrid.”  She rummaged in her pocket and brought out the ribbon.

“Will you take it again?” she said—­“oh, please, just to make me feel less horrid.  Oh, please take it!”

She looked at him with wet, imploring eyes, and held it out.

He took it, smoothed its crumpledness, and placed it in his pocket-book.

“God bless you,” he said, and the tone made Meg sob.

CHAPTER XX Little Judy

Across the grass came a little flying figure, Judy in a short pink frock with her wild curls blowing about her face.

“Are you a candidate for sunstroke—­where is your hat, Miss Judy?” Mr. Gillet asked.

Judy shook back her dark tangle: 

“Sorrow a know I knows,” she said—­“it’s a banana the General is afther dyin’ for, and sure it’s a dead body I shall live to see misself if you’ve eaten all the oranges.”

Meg pushed the bag of fruit across the cloth to her, and tried to tilt her hat over her tell-tale eyes.

But the bright dark ones had seen the wet lashes the first moment.

“I s’pose you’ve been reading stupid poetry and making Meg cry?” she said, with an aggressive glance from Mr. Gillet to the book on the grass.  “You really ought to be, ashamed of yourselves, SICH behaviour at a picnic.  It’s been a saving in oranges, though, that’s a mercy”

She took half a dozen great fat ones from the bag, as well as four or five bananas, and went back with flying steps to the belt of trees, where the General in his holland coat could just be seen.

He was calmly grubbing up the earth and putting it in his little red mouth when she arrived with the bananas.

He looked up at her with an adorable smile.  “Baby!” she said, swooping down upon him with one of her wild rushes.  “Baby!”

She kissed him fifty times; it almost hurt her sometimes, the feeling of love for this little fat, dirty boy.

Then she gathered him up on her knee and wiped as much of the dirt as possible from his mouth with the corner of his coat.

“Narna,” he said, struggling onto the ground again; so she took the skin from a great yellow one and put it in his small, chubby hand.

He ate some of it, and squeezed the rest up tightly in his hands, gleefully watching it come up between his wee fingers in little worm-like morsels.

Then he smeared it over his dimpled face, and even rubbed it on his hair, while Judy was engrossed with her fifth orange.

So, of course, she had to whip him for doing it, or pretend to, which came to the same thing.  And then he had to whip her, which did not only mean pretence.