“I thought you loved me, Elizabeth!” wailed Ernestine, reproachfully.
“So I do,” I answered, and hopped heroically forth to the glacial matting.
Ernie followed with hysterical giggles,—and I can tell you it did not take us long to dress!
Fortunately Miss Brown had gone to spend Sunday with a niece in Flatbush, so we did not have her to worry about. Mother made the nursery as comfortable as possible at the sacrifice of heavy inroads upon our precious stock of coal, and there Haze, Ernie, Robin, and I passed the morning. For Haze was taken ill Sunday night with a sharp attack of laryngitis, and was still unfit for the office; and we did not think it wise for Ernie to attempt to make her way to school through the snowdrifts. But, though it is not often now that we have the chance of a day together, it was not especially jolly.
Poor Hazey squatted on the register, very hoarse and gloomy, pegging away at his eternal Cæsar; I darned stockings, and understood just how it was that Rose had used to be cross on a stormy Monday; while Ernie, hid in a corner behind a series of screens that she had contrived, sang carols and asked ridiculous riddles, busy as she declared upon “a secret.”
As for Robin, he sat in his shabby little grey flannel dressing-gown, propped up with pillows in the middle of mother’s big bed, talking about Santa Claus and the things he wanted for Christmas.—
“I’ve been good for three weeks,” he boasted vaingloriously. “I’ve taken my cod-liver oil,—haven’t I, Elizabeth? And I’ve finished the First Reader, and learned to spell squirrel! Hope old Santa knows about it, ’cause I want a lot o’ things!”
“Why don’t you write a letter, and tell him what you want?” suggested Ernie.
Whereat, Hazard scowled at her over his Cæsar, and I shook my head warningly; but it was already too late. Robin caught gleefully at the suggestion.
“I will,” he piped. “Bring me some paper and a pencil, Elizabeth. Hurry up, now, honey!” For Bobsie dearly loves to write letters, and the fact that no one can read them but himself does not dampen his enthusiasm in the least.