"Let the girl alone," he said. "Too big for this sort of thing? Rubbish!
The milliner's bills will come in quite soon enough. And what's amiss with
Robin and Jack? Good boys as boys go, and she's another; and if they like
to scramble over hedges and ditches together, let them. For Heaven's sake,
Caroline, don't attempt to keep her at home: she'll certainly drive me
crazy if you do. No one ever banged doors as Lottie does: she ought to
patent the process. Slams them with a crash which jars the whole house, and
yet manages not to latch them, and the moment she is gone they are swinging
backward and forward till I'm almost out of my senses. Here she comes down
stairs, like a thunderbolt.--Lottie, my dear girl, I'm sure it's going to
be fine: better run out and look up those Wingfield boys, I think."

So the trio spent long half-holidays rambling in the fields; and on these
occasions Lottie might be met, an immense distance from home, in the
shabbiest clothes and wearing a red cap of Robin's tossed carelessly on her
dark hair. Percival once encountered them on one of these expeditions.
Lottie's beauty was still pale and unripe, like those sheathed buds which
will come suddenly to their glory of blossom, not like rosebuds which have
a loveliness of their own; but the young man was struck by the boyish
mixture of shyness and bluntness with which she greeted him, and attracted
by the great eyes which gazed at him from under Robin's shabby cap. When he
and Horace went to the Blakes' he amused himself idly enough with the
school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie. He laughed one day when
Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie's apparel, and said
something about "a sweet neglect." But the soul of Lottie's mamma was not
to be comforted with scraps of poetry. How could it be, when she had just
arraigned her daughter on the charge of having her pockets bulging
hideously, and had discovered that those receptacles overflowed with a
miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends, the accumulations of weeks,
tending to show that Lottie and Cock Robin, as she called him, had all
things in common? How could it be, when Lottie was always outgrowing her
garments in the most ungainly manner, so that her sleeves seemed to retreat
in horror from her wrists and from her long hands, tanned by sun and wind,
seamed with bramble-scratches and smeared with school-room ink? Once Lottie
came home with an unmistakable black eye, for which Robin