The Little White Horse Read Online Free PDF

and in duty bound she turned her attention back to her host.
    ‘I love horses, but I have not been taught to ride, Sir,’ she said.
    ‘Not been taught to ride!’ ejaculated Sir Benjamin in horror. ‘Whatever was your father thinking of? No Merryweather, male or female, is ever really happy out of the saddle.’
    ‘My father was so little at home,’ explained Maria.
    ‘Maria has no habit,’ Miss Heliotrope put in anxiously; for the thought of her precious Maria galloping about on horseback terrified her.
    ‘That is not of importance,’ said Sir Benjamin cheerfully. ‘What is of importance is that I have a pony just the right size for her.’
    Maria’s pale face flushed again and her eyes sparkled. ‘The white one?’ she asked with quite extraordinary eagerness.
    Sir Benjamin looked startled. ‘White? No. Dapple grey. Had you especially set your heart on a white mount?’
    ‘No-o,’ said Maria, not quite truthfully. ‘Only — I thought I saw a little white horse in the park as we drove through.’
    If she had startled her relative before, she had now dumbfounded him. He set down his wineglass rather suddenly, spilling a little of the beautiful claret, andgazed at her with the queerest expression on his face, a mixture of astonishment, relief, and profound tenderness that made Maria feel quite queer. She was glad when he stopped staring at her, drained his glass and got up.
    ‘Two such weary travellers — three if we include the little dog — must be longing for their beds,’ he said.
    They had been abruptly dismissed, Miss Heliotrope and Maria realized, yet they went bedwards with no sense of outrage, for a little oddness of behaviour was only to be expected in a man who had been for twenty years bereft of the civilizing influence of female companionship . . . Also he had been startled.
    ‘You must be careful not to startle him, my dear,’ said Miss Heliotrope, as they once more mounted the steps of their tower, with their candles in their hands and Wiggins pattering behind. ‘He is a man of considerable age and full habit, and perpetual shocks to his system will do him no good at all.’
    ‘But I didn’t mean to startle him,’ said Maria. ‘I only said I’d seen —’
    ‘You see very odd things,’ Miss Heliotrope interrupted her. ‘I myself have been considerably startled, at times, by the things you’ve seen and that I couldn’t see. There was the time you saw the cuckoo fly out of the cuckoo-clock and sit on top of it and preen his feathers, and that peculiar imaginary playmate of yours that you made up for yourself when you were only a little thing, that boy with the feather in his hat who used to play with you in the Square garden.’
    ‘But he
wasn’t
imaginary,’ said Maria hotly. ‘He was a real boy. He
is
a real boy. I know he’s alive somewhere still, even though he does not come to play with me any more. His name is Robin, and he looks like a robin, with bright dark eyes and rosy cheeks and —’
    ‘My dear,’ interrupted Miss Heliotrope again, somewhat sternly, ‘you have told me a thousand times what he looks like, or what you imagined at the time that he looked like, and I can only repeat that there was, and is,no such person.’
    Maria said no more, because she did not want to quarrel with Miss Heliotrope. The only subject upon which she and her governess had ever really disagreed with any heat was this subject of the existence or non-existence of Robin. Miss Heliotrope had been deeply distressed at Maria’s inability to draw the line between fiction and fact, and Maria had been equally distressed because her word was doubted; for Maria was very truthful, and when she said a thing was so nothing distressed her more than to hear people say it wasn’t.
    At the little door with the silver knocker Miss Heliotrope and Maria kissed each other good night affectionately, the tiny momentary rift between them quite forgotten.
    ‘You’d better have Wiggins at night,’