“Yes,” said Dolly, and there was a faint shadow of regret in her eyes.
Ted sat upright again. He had pretended to be bowed down to the ground with trembling fear about the subject.
“It just struck me it might be Elvira and Alphonso in three books of forty-nine cantos each,” he said.
“Or The Spirits of the Nether World,” said Clif. This wildly watery version of Paradise Lost, and a certain Spanish tragedy, impossibly long, were standing jokes in the house, yet the one shade on Dolly’s intense happiness that afternoon was the fact that it was not one of these ambitious efforts that was to see the light of print; she had a very small opinion herself of the children’s stories she scribbled so easily.
Freddie was round at Dolly’s elbow, assiduously offering her the sugar—which she never took—and pointing out the piece of cake which was richest in currants.
“Tommie Edwards at our school got a whole set for his birthday,—the bat and stumps and bails as well as the ball, Dolly,” he said.
[307]
]CHAPTER XXIX
AND THEN NO MORE
“Transportation for life was the sentence it gave,
And then to be fined forty pounds.”
Ted’s chuckle over the inference Freddie left for Dolly to draw from his remark gave place suddenly to an indignant shout.