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“She said, ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ till I told her to say something more amusing, and then she said, ‘I could cry for joy!’ and, ‘Tell Hobbs he remembers all my favorites.'”

Christopher here bent his head over his empty plate, and said grace (Chris is very particular about his grace), and then got down from his chair and went up to Lady Catherine, and threw his arms round her as far as they would go, saying, “You are good. And I love you. I should think she thinked you was a fairy godmother.”

After they had hugged each other, Aunt Catherine said, “Will you take me into the game, if I serve them that have no garden?”

Chris and I said “Yes” with one voice.

“Then come into the drawing-room,” said Aunt Catherine, getting up and giving a hand to each of us. “And Chris shall give me a name.”

Chris pondered a long time on this subject, and seemed a good deal disturbed in his mind. Presently he said, “I won’t be selfish. You shall have it.”

“Shall have what, you oddity?”

“I’m not an oddity, and I’m going to give you the name I invented for myself. But you’ll have to wear four stockings, two up and two down.”

“Then you may keep that name to yourself,” said Aunt Catherine.

Christopher looked relieved.

“Perhaps you’d not like to be called Old Man’s Beard?”

“Certainly not!” said Aunt Catherine.

“It is more of a boy’s name,” said Chris. “You might be the Franticke or Foolish Cowslip, but it is Jack an Apes on Horseback too, and that’s a boy’s name. You shall be a Daffodil, not a dwarf daffodil, but a big one, because you are big. Wait a minute–I know which you shall be. You shall be Nonsuch. It’s a very big one, and it means none like it. So you shall be Nonsuch, for there’s no one like you.”

On which Christopher and Lady Catherine hugged each other afresh.

* * * * *

“Who told most to-day?” asked Father when we got home.

“Oh, Aunt Catherine. Much most,” said Christopher.

CHAPTER XI.

The height of our game was in Autumn. It is such a good time for digging up, and planting, and dividing, and making cuttings, and gathering seeds, and sowing them too. But it went by very quickly, and when the leaves began to fall they fell very quickly, and Arthur never had to go up the trees and shake them.

After the first hard frost we quite gave up playing at the Earthly Paradise; first, because there was nothing we could do, and, secondly, because a lot of snow fell, and Arthur had a grand idea of making snow statues all along the terrace, so that Mother could see them from the drawing-room windows. We worked very hard, and it was very difficult to manage legs without breaking; so we made most of them Romans in togas, and they looked very well from a distance, and lasted a long time, because the frost lasted.

And, by degrees, I almost forgot that terrible afternoon in Mary’s Meadow. Only when Saxon came to see us I told him that I was very glad that no one understood his bark, so that he could not let out what had become of the hose-in-hose.

But when the winter was past, and the snowdrops came out in the shrubbery, and there were catkins on the nut trees, and the missel thrush we had been feeding in the frost sat out on mild days and sang to us, we all of us began to think of our gardens again, and to go poking about “with our noses in the borders,” as Arthur said, “as if we were dogs snuffing after truffles.” What we really were “snuffing after” were the plants we had planted in autumn, and which were poking and sprouting, and coming up in all directions.