“Why,” said one of the ladies in the wagonette, “there are the little Lomaxes,—I didn’t know they were up.” She stopped the driver.
[p19]
Lynn and Muffie and Max were for rushing out and charging bodily into the vehicle, and indeed one of the ladies was beckoning encouragingly to them all.
Lynn’s swift imagination saw themselves borne joyously off to the loved waterfall; she felt the very water of the cool delicious pools on her hot feet.
But Pauline, with a look of absolute tragedy on her fair little face, banged the gate and kept her brothers and sisters on the hither side of it.
“We’re contagious,” she shouted.
“Wha-a-at?” said the lady.
“Whooping cough,” said Pauline with extreme dejection in her tone, and as if for a guarantee of her veracity Max was seized with a paroxysm then and there, and Muffie followed suit.
“Oh, drive on!” cried the lady hastily to her man, and gave an alarmed look at her own little flock. But she pulled up again fifty yards away and came back on foot and stood a very respectable distance away from the infected spot.
“I’m so sorry, chickies,” she said kindly; “that’s a wretched visitor for the holidays. Have you been very bad?”
“I go nearly lack in the face,” said Max, not without pride.