The nursery party up-stairs soon calmed down. Nurse restored order, and set the three delinquents in separate corners of the room. Her tongue was a powerful one, and she did not spare them.
"I shall be thankful to get out of the house, for never in my life have I seen such bold, owdacious children, and no respectable woman would stand it. Your sister ought to look after you herself, and then she'd know what you were like. She dances out to all her gaieties with that lazy Miss Webb, who's in a field of clover if any one is, and expects me to grind on in this four-walled room without a friend to keep me company. I would as soon be in prison, and I'm not going to stand it. And as for you, with your monkey tricks and your wicked ways, you want to be well whipped and placed in a reformatory. That's the place for the likes of you!"
No one dared speak. She talked on in the same strain for a good quarter of an hour, then dared them at the peril of their lives to move from their seats, and walked down to the servants' hall again.
"Sunday is a dreadful day," observed Jill plaintively. "I wonder what it was made for!"
"I s'pose God thought it would make people good," said Jack; "it may do grown-up people good, but it makes children dreadfully wicked!"
"Yes," assented Jill; "because there's nothing to do after church, and we're always shut up in this old nursery. When I grow up I shall live in a house without any doors, so that I can never be shut up anywhere!"
Jack looked across at his sister meditatively.
"Then what would you do when robbers came?"
"I'd run away, of course, stupid!"