“And with the shells on!” she cried.
“Makes more to ’em,” he explained.
“Stop it!”
“I won’t,” Robert said doggedly. “I’m goin’ to do what I please to-night, no matter how much trouble I get into to-morrow!”
“What ‘trouble’ do you expect to-morrow?”
“Didn’t you hear about it?” he asked. “Papa and mamma were talkin’ about it at lunch.”
“I didn’t hear them.”
“I guess it was before you came down,” Robert said; and then he gave her a surprise. “The painter was here this morning, and they got it all fixed up.”
Muriel moved back from him a step, and inexplicably a dismal foreboding took her. “What?” she said.
“Well, the thing that bothers me is simply this,” Robert informed her: “He told mamma he’d have to bring his little boy along and let him play around here as long as the work went on. He said he has to take this boy along with him, because his wife’s a dentist’s ’sistant and can’t keep him around a dentist office, and they haven’t got any place to leave him. He’s about nine years old, and I’ll bet anything I have trouble with him before the day’s over.”