“You do it lots better, Cricket,” said Eunice. “She really does, mamma. She’s practised it with me, you know, up-stairs. Let’s do it now, Cricket.”
And Cricket, nothing loath, jumped up, and the children went through the scene. Cricket was always such an enthusiastic little soul about everything she did, that she made herself literally the character she was acting.
“Oh, I’m just pining away to be in the play,” she said, sinking down on a couch and fanning herself, amid the applause of the family.
“You look pretty healthy for one who is in that state,” said Doctor Ward.
They were all in the parlour for the jolly half-hour after dinner.
“I don’t show it much, I suppose,” said Cricket thoughtfully, “but, really, it just pines inside all the time.”
“Do you remember, mamma,” put in Marjorie, “how Eunice, when she was a little thing, used to like to sit up at the piano and sing, and pretend to play her accompaniments? There was one particular song she always tried. It had a chorus, ‘Maggie, dear Maggie, I’m pinning for thee!’ as Eunice used to say it. Cricket might sing now, ‘Oh, Nancy, dear Nancy, I’m pining for thee!’”
“By the way, what is that ghostly song you are so fond of singing about the house, Marjorie?” asked Doctor Ward, looking up from his evening paper. “I only can make out the chorus, ‘Repack, repack, repack my body to me,—to me.’”
There was a shout of laughter that nearly drowned Marjorie’s astonished protest that she never sang anything so sepulchral.
“You certainly do, often,” insisted Doctor Ward. “This very afternoon, not long before dinner, I heard you and two or three of your friends, in the music-room, singing, and one of the things you sang was that very song, only you sang it this way: ‘Repack my body to me,—same old body.’”