[34] To Janet's attack, Priscilla answered not a word either of explanation or apology. She recognised that the case had gone far beyond that. She only set Sir Toady Lion on his feet, and bent down to brush the mud from his tunic with her usual sisterly gesture. Janet Sheepshanks thrust her aside without ceremony. "My wee man," she said, "what have they done to you?" Toady Lion began volubly, and in his usual shrill piping voice, to make an accusation against certain bad boys who had "hit him," and "hurted him," and "kicked him." And now when at last he was safely delivered and lodged in the well-proven arms of Janet Sheepshanks his tears flowed apace, and made clean furrows down the woebegone grubbiness of his face. Priscilla walked by Janet's side, white and silent, nerving herself for the coming interview. At ordinary times Janet Sheepshanks was terrible enough, and her word law in all the precincts of Windy Standard. But Priscilla knew that she must now face the anger of her father; and so, with this in prospect, the railing accusations of her old nurse scarcely so much as reached her ears. Hugh John, stripped of all military pomp, limped behind—a short, dry, cheerless sob shaking him at intervals. But in reality this was more the protest of ineffectual anger than any concession to unmanly weakness. [35] [35] CHAPTER VI FIRST BLOOD. TEN minutes later, and without, as Jane Sheepshanks said, "so muckle as a sponge or a brush-and-comb being laid upon them," the three stood before their father. Silently Janet had introduced them, and now as silently she stood aside to listen to the evidence—and, as she put it, "keep the maister to his duty, and mind him o' his responsibilities to them that's gane." T Janet Sheepshanks never forgot that she had been maid for twenty years to the dead mother of the children, nor that she had received "the bits o' weans" at her hand as a dying charge. She considered herself, with some reason, to be
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