“Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven,” said Elfrida, and ended in a sob,—“the door’s gone! We shall have to stay here for ever and ever. Oh, I want auntie—I do, I do!”
She sat down abruptly on a small green mat in front of the last door, which happened to be that of the kitchen.
Edred says he did not cry too. And if what he says is true, Elfrida’s crying must have been louder than was usual with her; for the kitchen door opened, and the two children were caught up in two fat arms and hurried into a pleasant kitchen, where bright brass and copper pots hung on the walls, and between a large fire and a large meat screen a leg of mutton turned round and round with nobody to help it.
“Hold your noise,” said the owner of the fat arms, who now proved to be a very stout woman in a chocolate-coloured print gown sprigged with blue roses. She had a large linen apron and a cap with flappy frills, and between the frills just such another good, kind, jolly face as Mrs. Honeysett’s own. “Here, stop your mouths,” she said, “or your granny’ll be after you—to say nothing of Boney. Stop your crying, do, and see what cookie’s got for you.”
She opened a tin canister and picked out two lumps of brown stuff that looked like sand—about the size and shape of prunes they were.
“What’s that?” Edred asked.
“Drabbit me,” said the cook, “what a child it is! Not know sugar when he sees it! Well, well, Master Edred, what next, I should like to know?”
The children took the lumps and sucked them. They were of sugar, sure enough, but the sugar had a strong, coarse taste behind its sweetness, and if the children had really not been quite extra polite and kind they would have followed the promptings of Nature and—— But, of course, they knew that this would be both disgusting and ungrateful. So they got the sugar down somehow, while cook beamed at them with a wide, kind smile between her cap-frills, and two hands, as big as little beefsteak puddings, on her hips.
“Now, no more crybabying,” she said; “run along and play.”
“We’ve got to take granny’s letter to post,” said Edred, “and we don’t——”