Their promise, they considered, bound their hands from taking the wooden couple out, but it was great [181] ]happiness to find them still there. And to this very day Muriel and Sir Guy may be still adventuring in those iron recesses and exposing themselves to the world’s hardships; for many years after Dolly found Muriel there and took her out and laughed and put her back again.
After the interdict was placed on wooden images, the pair fell to playing “beggar-my-neighbour” and “old maid” in the long evenings after tea, but the possibilities of cards urged themselves too strongly for resistance, and after Weenie had gone to bed dramas were once more enacted, the cards themselves for puppets.
“You don’t mind us pretending with cards, mama?” they had said, and Mrs. Conway, not quite comprehending, had told them to please themselves.
The queen of spades was Dolly’s heroine now; she saw in her a dark little girl with flashing eyes and a propensity for getting into terrible mischief, and then dying with pious words of exhortation on her lips and all her weeping relatives around her bed. She was a unique mixture of Topsy and Eva, and Dolly named her Judy.
Phyl’s heroine was the queen of hearts; the knave of diamonds, a handsome hero named Lochinvar; and on the knave of clubs was heaped all the villainy a heart of thirteen could conceive. The king of clubs with both was always the heavy father.
Aces were tiny babies, and fours and fives little children of the house. Tens were the servants, [182] ]spades and clubs being footmen, butlers, gardeners, and other “ancient retainers,” while diamonds and hearts were housekeepers with stiff black silk dresses and bunches of jingling keys, pert ladies’-maids and nurses.
Both children always kept up a large establishment, and placed their characters in “old turreted mansions hoary with age,” or Venetian palaces, or moated castles.
But when Phyl’s fourteenth birthday came round she renounced for ever all puppets, and took with greater avidity to reading.
Dolly played a little longer. She had been bitten with the mania for collecting stamps and shells, and now being left lonely—for the card game lost interest without Phyl’s companionship—shells served their turn as the bits of wood and cards had done.
Saturday afternoon, after they returned to Sydney, always found the little girls on some beach—Manly, Bondi, Coogee, or Bronté,—for it seemed a delightful thing to them that the seaside was to be reached at any time by a tram or boat ride, instead of waiting a whole year for three or four weeks of it as had been their English habit.