“Oh dear! oh dear!” cried the mother, when after much questioning all the story of the night was extracted. “What am I going to do with you? Phyl, Phyl, are you trying to break my heart again? Dolly, and you promised to help me!”
[26]
]“We didn’t think,” sobbed the little girls, heartbroken themselves to have given such trouble.
“But you never do,” said the distracted young mother. “All these dreadful, dreadful things that come into your heads,—you always do them first, and then are sorry after.”
“If only you had forbidden us to do it,” wept Phyl; “we never do the things you forbid, do we, mother?”
The mother was forced to admit this; their obedience to direct command was unswerving, but how could any one circumvent wild proceedings by laying an embargo on them before the wild young minds had conceived them?
“How could I have dreamed you would do anything so mad?” she said. “Didn’t you stay one moment to think how it would grieve me?”
“When we got back we did,” said Dolly, with streaming eyes, “and Phyl ate ever so much cod-liver oil to please you.”
What was there to be done but scold and scold, and then beg and entreat future carefulness?
“Write it down in the book, Dolly,” Phyl said, when the mother had gone off to see about linseed poultices and hot drinks.
And Dolly got out a little book made of bits of paper stitched together by themselves, and she made one new entry on the list of “Things we’re not to do on any account.”