now that a person
might very well be frightened at finding Indians in the hall of a
strange house, especially if the person had just come from the kind of
India where the Indians are quite a different sort, and much milder,
with no feathers and wigwams and war-dances, but only dusky features and
University Degrees.

X

THE AUNT AND AMABEL

It is not pleasant to be a fish out of water. To be a cat in water is
not what any one would desire. To be in a temper is uncomfortable. And
no one can fully taste the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord
Fauntleroy suit. But by far the most uncomfortable thing to be in is
disgrace, sometimes amusingly called Coventry by the people who are not
in it.

We have all been there. It is a place where the heart sinks and aches,
where familiar faces are clouded and changed, where any remark that one
may tremblingly make is received with stony silence or with the
assurance that nobody wants to talk to such a naughty child. If you are
only in disgrace, and not in solitary confinement, you will creep about
a house that is like the one you have had such jolly times in, and yet
as unlike it as a bad dream is to a June morning. You will long to speak
to people, and be afraid to speak. You will wonder whether there is
anything you can do that will change things at all. You have said you
are sorry, and that has changed nothing. You will wonder whether you are
to stay for ever in this desolate place, outside all hope and love and
fun and happiness. And though it has happened before, and has always, in
the end, come to an end, you can never be quite sure that this time it
is not going to last for ever.

'It _is_ going to last for ever,' said Amabel, who was eight. 'What
shall I do? Oh whatever shall I do?'

What she _had_ done ought to have formed the subject of her
meditations. And she had done what had seemed to her all the time, and
in fact still seemed, a self-sacrificing and noble act. She was staying
with an aunt--measles or a new baby, or the painters in the house, I
forget which, the cause of her banishment. And the aunt, who was really
a great-aunt and quite old enough to know better, had been grumbling
about her head gardener to a lady who called in blue spectacles and a
beady bonnet with violet flowers in it.

'He hardly lets me have a plant for the table,' said the aunt, 'and that
border in front of the breakfast-room window--it's just bare earth--and
I expressly ordered