which were all very excellent, only she changed them so often. She
would waken her sister in the middle of the night with the eager
exclamation, 'Angel dear, I beg your pardon for disturbing you, but
don't you think we should begin at once teaching Godfrey to dance? It
is such an excellent exercise you know, and I thought I might give him
an hour every morning after breakfast, when he generally goes in the
garden while you're talking to Penny.'

And Angel would say, in a rather sleepy voice,

'But, Betty dear, what about washing the china?'

And Betty would start off at once on a new set of arrangements to fit
in everything.

Or she would burst into the kitchen with another idea, while Angelica
was ordering the dinner.

'Angel dear, don't you think it would be very healthy for Godfrey to
live entirely on vegetables? In that paper Cousin Crayshaw brought
down it said it was such a capital thing for children. He might begin
on potatoes to-day, and to-morrow he might have vegetable marrow, and
we might draw up a list for every day in the week.'

It was all rather distracting to Angel, who felt quite sure that Betty
was much cleverer than she was, and yet dreaded trying any experiment
with Godfrey which she did not quite understand. It was Betty's idea
that Godfrey should spend Sunday afternoon in learning his Catechism;
all children learnt their Catechism on a Sunday, she said, and the
sooner Godfrey began the better. Besides, once a month the children
were catechized in church, and she didn't want him to be behind Nancy
Rogers and Jerry Ware, and all the village boys and girls. So he said
the answers after her and she explained them, which she certainly did
very brightly and very well, and on week-days Angel taught him the
earlier ones, in her gentle, plodding way, till he knew them by heart.
He had done what his Aunt Betty required of him by the time Angel had
taken two more turns, and was having his reward in the story which he
called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite of all Betty's
tales, and it was the sort she liked best to tell, with a little bit of
fact and a great deal of imagining. Certainly there was not very much
fact to begin upon, only an old tradition of one of William the
Conqueror's barons, who had long ago owned land at Oakfield and had
planted the tree which gave the place its name. What chiefly
interested Godfrey was that the baron of the oak had borne the same
Christian nam