CHAPTER I
THREE CHILDREN AND A DOG
‘Emmeline, it’s your turn to choose a game to-day. What story shall we do?’
‘No, Micky; it’s your turn,’ put in his twin sister Kitty. ‘Emmeline chose the day before yesterday.’
‘I know it’s my turn really, Kitty, but gentlemen always let ladies choose,’ said eight-year-old Micky with dignity. ‘I’d very much advise “Swiss Family Robinson,” because it seems such a splendid opportunity, now the curtain-rods are down, to use the short ones as sugar-canes; and Mary’s so sorry we’re going away to-morrow that she won’t be cross even if the paint does get a little kicked off the bath when it’s being wrecked.’
‘Micky, I think it’s horrid of you to talk of Mary’s being sorry like that,’ said Emmeline—‘just as if you didn’t care a bit about our having to leave the home of a lifetime, and the only real friend who has been with us since we were babies, to go and live with an aunt who doesn’t care for us!’
‘How do you know Aunt Grace doesn’t care for us? She’s always very jolly when she comes here, and she never forgets birthdays,’ said Micky, who had a sense of justice. ‘She sends such sensible things, too—postal orders, or steam-engines that really work, or real good books of adventure. She never gives you poetry-books.’ This last was a sore point with Micky just then, for his godmother had recently presented him with a gilt-edged volume of ‘The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth,’ for which he had been expected to write a laborious round-hand letter of thanks.
‘Presents are all very well, but they don’t prove that a person loves you,’ said Emmeline; ‘and as to her being jolly when she comes here, she never stays more than a day or two at a time, and always seems in a great hurry to get back to London again. Do you think, if she had really cared anything about us, she would have left us a whole year after darling mother died before offering to come and look after us?’
This was rather out of Micky’s depth, so he prudently changed the subject. ‘Well, let’s get started with the game,’ he said, ‘else we shall have to get tidy for tea before we’ve even been properly wrecked.’
But Emmeline was not to be put off so easily. ‘Micky,’ she demanded solemnly, ‘how can you be so taken up with story-games when we’re as good as living a story ourselves?’
The twins’ eyes sparkled. Anything savouring of romance was as the breath of life to them, and Emmeline was really rather impressive when she talked in that grave way.