Hooray! hooray! hooray!
Mother comes home to-day;
Mother comes home to-day,
Hooray! hooray! hooray!’
Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the Phoenix shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.
‘How beautiful,’ it said, ‘is filial devotion!’
‘She won’t be home till past bedtime, though,’ said Robert. ‘We might have one more carpet-day.’
He was glad that mother was coming home—quite glad, very glad; but at the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite strong feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day on the carpet.
‘I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only she’d want to know where we got it,’ said Anthea. ‘And she’d never, never believe it, the truth. People never do, somehow, if it’s at all interesting.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Robert. ‘Suppose we wished the carpet to take us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in it—then we could buy her something.’
‘Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered with strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full of money that wasn’t money at all here, only foreign curiosities, then we couldn’t spend it, and people would bother about where we got it, and we shouldn’t know how on earth to get out of it at all.’
Cyril moved the table off the carpet as he spoke, and its leg caught in one of Anthea’s darns and ripped away most of it, as well as a large slit in the carpet.
‘Well, now you HAVE done it,’ said Robert.