'O Angel, how could you!'
'You don't mean that it did the harm! Bobbie said so; but I didn't think Alda could be so silly as to think it in earnest, Cherry.'
'Angel, you have been playing with edge-tools.'
'Cherry, tell me what you mean!' Angela pounced on both her arms, as if to shake it out of her.
'Never do such a thing again, Angel. You cannot tell what you may be doing.'
'Well, if any one could be so stupid! So dense, as not to see it was fun! Now, Robin—'
'I think,' said the practical Robin, 'that all you can do, is to write down a full confession that you meant to tease Alda.'
'Yes, yes, yes,' cried Angela, with less shame than Cherry would have thought possible, 'I will! I will! and then they'll make it up. Who would have thought Alda could have been so easily taken in? But how shall I do it unknownst to the harpies?'
Cherry offered a pencil, and a bit of her drawing-block. She made no suggestion, thinking that the more characteristic the confession was, the more it would prove its authenticity. Angela retired into a window, and wrote, in her queer unformed hand:
I, Angela Margaret Underwood, hereby confess that whatever I told Alda, my sister, about Geraldine and F.T., was all cram; and if I did it too well, I'm very sorry for it. F.T. didn't take a bit more notice of Cherry than of Robin and me; and of course he cannot marry the three of us: and of course it was all right, for Clement was there. Ask him.
Witness my hand,
ANGELA MARGARET UNDERWOOD.