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“You won’t let him take the Woolly Beast from me, Isobel?” cried Charles. “And you know you promised to lend me your ostrich plume.”

“Certainly not,” said I. “And you shall have the feather. I promised.”

“If Mr. Clinton acts–I shan’t,” said Alice.

“Mr. Clinton won’t act,” said I, “I can’t alter the piece now. But I wish, Alice, you were not always so very ready to drive things into a quarrel.”

“If we hadn’t given way to Philip so much he wouldn’t think we can bear anything,” said Alice.

I could not but feel that there was some truth in this, and that it was a dilemma not provided against in Aunt Isobel’s teaching, that one may be so obliging to those one lives with as to encourage, if not to teach them to be selfish.

Perhaps it would have been well if on the first day when Philip deserted us Alice and I, had spent the afternoon with Lucy Lambent, and if we had continued to amuse ourselves with our friends when Philip amused himself with his. We should then have been forced into a common decision as to whether the play should be given up, and, without reproaches or counter-reproaches, Philip would have learned that he could not leave all the work to us, and then arrange and disarrange the plot at his own pleasure, or rather, he would never have thought that he could. But a plan of this kind requires to be carried out with perfect coolness to be either justifiable or effective. And we have not a cool head amongst us.

One thing was clear. I ought to keep faith with the others who had worked when Philip would not. Charles should not be turned out of his part I rather hustled over the question of a new part for Mr. Clinton in my mind. I disliked him, and did not want to introduce him. I said to myself that it was quite unreasonable–out of the question in fact–and I prepared to say so to Philip.

Of course he was furious–that I knew he would be; but I was firm.

“Charles can be the Old Father, and the Family Servant too,” said he. “They’re both good parts.”

“Then give them to Mr. Clinton,” said I, well knowing that he would not. “Charles has taken a great deal of pains with his part, and these are his holidays as well as yours, and the Prince shall not be taken from him.”

“Well, I say it shall. And Charles may be uncommonly glad if I let him act at all after the way he behaved yesterday.”

“The way you behaved, you, mean,” said I–for my temper was slipping from my grasp;–“you might have broken his neck.”

“All the more danger in his provoking me, and in your encouraging him.”

I began to feel giddy, which is always a bad sign with us. It rang in my mind’s ear that this was what came of being forbearing with a bully like Philip. But I still tried to speak quietly.

“If you think,” said I through my teeth, “that I am going to let you knock the others about, and rough-ride it over our theatricals, you are mistaken.”

“Your theatricals!” cried Philip, mimicking me. “I like that! Whom do the properties belong to, pray?”

“If it goes by buying,” was my reply to this rather difficult question, “most of them belong to Granny, for the canvas and the paints and the stuff for the dresses, have gone down in the bills; and if it goes by work, I think we have done quite as much as you. And if some of the properties are yours, the play is mine. And as to the scene–you did the distance in the middle of the wood, but Alice and I painted all the foreground.”

“Then you may keep your foreground, and I’ll take my distance,” roared Philip, and in a moment his pocket-knife was open, and he had cut a hole a foot-and-a-half square in the centre of the Enchanted Forest, and Bobby’s amazed face (he was running a tuck in his cloak behind the scenes) appeared through the aperture.