door-step! No--I don't mean to use it on your step-father. I'll have
your pretty ears mummified and wear them on my watch-chain. No--mind
my spectacles! Let me go. I daresay it won't come to anything."

"Do you really mean you'd take me?"

"I'd take you fast enough, but I wouldn't keep you. We must find a
dragon to guard the Princess. Oh, we'll get a nice tame kind puss-cat
of a dragon,--but that dragon will not be your Aunt Julia! Let me go,
I say. I thought you didn't care about anything any more?"

"I didn't know there could be anything to care for," said Betty
honestly, "especially Paris. Well, I won't if you hate it so, but oh,
aunt--" She still sat on the floor by the chair her aunt had left, and
thought and thought. The aunt went straight down to the study.

"Now, Cecil," she said, coming briskly in and shutting the door,
"you've made that poor child hate the thought of you and you've only
yourself to thank."

"I know you think so," said he, closing the heavy book over which he
had been stooping.

"I don't mean," she added hastily, for she was not a cruel woman,
"that she really hates you, of course. But you've frightened her, and
shaken her nerves, locking her up in her room like that. Upon my word,
you are old enough to know better!"

"I was so alarmed, so shaken myself--" he began, but she interrupted
him.