When the letters were done, it was only eleven o’clock, and it was decided that, as Rupert must have had his breakfast, it wouldn’t be unfeeling to play desert islands, just to pass the time till it should be twelve.
The dining-room table made an excellent island, and the arm-chair was a ship which held the three of them, and could, with reasonable care, be wrecked quite safely on the deep waters of the hearth-rug. The card-table from the window, turned wrong way up, made a charming raft; and the girls’ pinafores, fastened to the poker and tongs, did for sails. You steered with the fire-shovel and brought bags of biscuit (which looked like cushions) from the good vessel, the Golden Vanity, which, disguised as the sofa, lay derelict across the Carpet Bay. It was a grand game, and when some one began to say ‘Twelve o’clock,’ the shipwrecked sailors were quite astonished. The person who began to say ‘Twelve,’ was, of course, the tall clock with the silver face inlaid with golden roses.
‘We ought to go at once,’ said Caroline, putting the masts back in the fender; ‘but if we leave everything like this, the Wil-cat——’
‘We’ll clear up,’ said Charlotte with a noble effort, ‘to make up for being beastly yesterday. You go, Caro. We’ll come out as soon as we’ve done, and stand in the door till you tell us it’s all right.’
‘That’s jolly decent of her,’ Charles told Caroline. ‘And I say the same.’
‘Jolly decent of you,’ said Caroline, and went.
It was still raining. Caroline stood at the back door with a rose and two buds in her hand, and watched the rain splashing in the puddles and on to the sack-covered shoulders of the gardener and the gardener’s boy and the stable boy as they went off to their dinners. As soon as she could be quite sure that they had really gone and wouldn’t be likely to come back for anything they’d forgotten, she ran across to the harness-room.
‘Here’s your new secret rose,’ she said, ‘and now can I see Rupert? The others’ll be out directly.’
‘Go and tell them to stay where they be,’ said William crossly; ‘there won’t be much secret rosing left if you’re all hanging about here. And Mrs. What’s-her-name’s equivalent to a bit of secret nosing herself, if you come to that. Hurry up now, afore they comes along.’