With the constant derision that so much boy companionship brought at Sunnymeade, Jennie and Suey had been forced to retire from adventurous lives, and now, wrapped in soft old handkerchiefs, they passed their later days in a quiet box that stood on a cupboard shelf.
Suey had lost an arm; that was on one occasion in Sunnymeade, when a bushranging game had been popular, and Clif, admitted half-jealously to it, had seized her so roughly from the burning roof of the station he had stuck up, that all Phyl’s heartbroken care could effect no remedy.
And Jennie’s thin hair was drawn back and combed carefully to conceal the sad fact that the back half of her head was false. This was also due to Clif. Enmity used sometimes to reign between the boys and girls in the two cottages, and on these occasions Dolly used to take a wicked pleasure in running [176] ]through the careful rings of marbles Clif and Teddie would make.
Retaliation had once carried Jennie high up a gum-tree near. “The lovely hewoine twying to escape from the hangman on the Tower of London,” Clif had called teasingly from his height, and he had thereupon lowered the waxen creature by a piece of string.
Underneath the tree, Dolly jumped about in anguish. “Oh, Clif, please, Clif—dear Clif, do give her to me. I’ll never jump on your marbles again, twuly I won’t,” she cried beseechingly.
Jennie dangled within a foot of her head,—she sprang up again and again to grasp her, but each time just as her hands almost closed on her treasure, the string was jerked, and the “escaping hewoine” swung yards away.
There was one jerk too many of course, and poor Jennie lay at the foot of the tree, her head broken in two places. The “hangman” dropped to the ground, real distress on his face, so anguished was the cry of the mother as she dropped down beside her darling.
Mrs. Conway patched up the poor head, and time dried Dolly’s tears, but so keen was Clif’s repentance, and so many his hearty endeavours to make up, that the incident cemented a friendship between the little couple that lasted always.
But now such days and deeds had gone for ever. The dolls, worn out by their troublous life, lay at rest, [177] ]and the little mother’s empty hands, groping for something to fill them, fastened after a time as a matter of course on pens.
There was an interval, however, before that relief came, in which the passion for “pretending” vented itself in an odd way. Mrs. Conway once, in turning over the frocks of her elder daughters, found in the pockets of both a number of small bits of wood. They were of different sizes, none more than a couple of inches high, and perhaps half an inch wide. Each one was wrapped in some scrap or other of material, one perhaps in white muslin with a scrap of blue silk tying it round the middle, one in a morsel of red cashmere, one in blue serge, and so on. She turned them over curiously in her hand.