"What makes you call her Cerise?" said Rose.
"Practising my French. Of course I never thought of her in common English when I was away."
"Cherry, he cannot be with you five minutes without beginning to tease," said the girls, laughing. "He is the very same boy he always was."
"I think he has made good progress in the art of telling fibs," said Cherry in turn.
"Fibs!" Magnus repeated, with much unworded scorn. "You'll see about that. I mean to tell the truth while I am home now, if I never do again." And with the most funny, rollicking tone Mr. Kindred caught up his banjo and dashed off into "The Girl I Left Behind Me"; rattling it out, throwing in recitative here and there, and putting such spirit and vim into the performance that now the girls all laughed till they nearly cried again; but this time Cherry kept her eyes on her cream.
Then quick and easily as the band had done, Magnus dropped once more into the plaintive burden of:
"Home, home; sweet, sweet home;
There is no place like home,—
There is no place like home."
But now, when he stopped playing, his two sisters came round him caressing him, hanging upon him, and even Mrs. Kindred looked in from the other room and said:
"Magnus, don't play that any more. You break my heart. I shall never be able to let you go back again."
Magnus laid the banjo aside.