How beautiful that poem seemed to them at the time! Perhaps nothing either of them ever wrote in after years afforded them such exquisite satisfaction. Dolly glowed all over with pride in her sister and pride in herself that she should have so beautiful a poem for her beloved paper. And at Dolly’s praises the modest poetess exulted more and more; she even had a rapt vision before she slept that night, of a sweet little volume, in willow green, entitled “Sea Fancies,” or “Rose Petals,” bearing on its front page the words, “By Phyllida Rankin Conway,” and on the next, “Dedicated to my sister, Dorothy Rankin Conway.”
From the window, as she stood up to reach her school-books, Dorothy saw the doctor’s silent flying figure come down the moonlit road, and three minutes later there came the dull sound of the bicycle’s wheels along the verandah.
Both girls instantly laid down paper and pens and went down-stairs.
[218]
]CHAPTER XX
THE ‘GERMAN SAUSAGE’ LAND
“No pretence
To intellectual eminence,
Or scholarship sublime.”
The dining-room was in an uproar, and it was to be feared nobody’s home-lessons were well done. Weenie had had a map of Europe to do; she also had recently expended the sum of a shilling on a box of coloured crayons. As a natural result she had devoted a bare five minutes to an unrecognizable outline of the Continent, and spent the rest of the evening in making a Joseph’s coat of it. The boys all insisted in having a voice in the selection of colours. Weenie had considered pink would look well for France, seeing she had coloured the Channel and Bay of Biscay a deep indigo, and Belgium and Holland two shades of green. But Alf, fresh from A Tale of Two Cities, insisted it must be dyed incarnadine.
“But I’ve done Spain red,” objected the artist.
“Rub some blue over the red, then.” Alf said.