Betty playfully thrust a small forefinger into one of the fresh biscuits on the table and bore it, impaled on the rosy weapon, triumphantly to her plate. This was for the amusement of Moses, but instead of laughing as he was expected to do, he eyed his little sister with assumed indifference.
“You carnt spell so smart anyways,” he ventured. Betty turned her piquant nose up at him and suddenly bounced up from the table.
“Oh, poor li’l Nancy wants in!” She raised the window and gently lifted the cat into the room. Running to her place at the table, she poured half of her cup of milk into a saucer and set it in a sunny spot on the floor.
“There Nancy,” she whispered, “is a sunbeam for breakfast dipped in milk.”
The sunbeam somehow got into the internal decorations of Nancy and filtered out through her eyes. Their amber depths seemed to have turned into liquid gold.
Jethro, lying on a mat at the door, was contentedly gnawing a bone. Nancy, having finished her milk, and still enjoying its flavor from her whiskers, as Betty remarked, stealthily approached her canine playmate. A slight altercation took place concerning the ownership of the bone. It was not long before Jethro walked out of the room, perceptibly toeing in, and probably reflecting that life was too short to wrangle over a bare bone anyway.
Mrs. Wopp was too busy to eat breakfast in the orthodox fashion. She could be heard in the kitchen preparing for the trying ordeal of wash-day. Out in the yard the head of the house was busy feeding the fowl.
Clank! Clank! Clank!
The sound was an ominous warning to Moses, to finish his breakfast with all possible speed.
“Good-by Dad and Mar and Mosey,” called Betty as she sped down the path toward the school-house.