“You won’t,” said Lynn, who was subject to fits of pessimism, “you’ll never spend it. Anna will never have finished washing up. Miss Bibby will never have finished writing to mamma. We’ll never get up to the shops. We’ll have to stop shut up here for ever.”
“But why,” said Muffie, who was only six, and easily bewildered by words, “why can’t we do like always and ever when we come up here?”
“Why, indeed!” said Pauline with much bitterness.
Max, the only son of the Judge and aged just four, had a clear way of his own of arriving at the cause of various effects.
“Wish a late big lecipice would fall on Anna,” he said.
“Really, Max,” said Lynn, whose unspent penny was burning a hole in her temper, “you are getting too big to talk like that. Late big lecipice! Say, great big precipice.”
“I did,” said Max indignantly,—“I’ll push you off the gate in a minute.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?”