Dolly shook her off.
“Take no notice of her,” she whispered to Phyl; “she can’t guess what we’re doing, and she’ll soon get tired and go away.”
They continued their work.
A disinterested observer would have imagined they were pretending they were blind, for they were moving [74] ]slowly up and down the room close to the wall with their finger-tips feeling carefully all over the paper. Sometimes one of them would rap on it with her knuckles, and the other put her ear close to the place and listen carefully.
Weenie watched them enviously all the time.
“I know,” she said, “you’re playing you’re painting the house!”
When they had treated all four walls in this strange fashion they began on the stuffed chairs—they were in the drawing-room—and kneeling down in front of the two large ones and the sofa, they pushed their hands down the part where the backs joined the seats. Strange things too they brought up—buttons, several hairpins, a tiny pair of scissors lost for months, quantities of fluff and dust, and a silver sixpence. Weenie was quite excited at the various finds, but the elder girls took little notice and continued their work. They pulled a little table up close to the wall, climbed on it and peered behind every picture; they lifted two or three rugs and looked underneath; Phyl even poked her arms up the chimney, felt about and withdrew them black with soot.
As Dolly had foretold, Weenie’s patience was not equal to her curiosity, and after a time she wandered away. But when the same strange proceedings began again in the afternoon, and all that time neither of her sisters would join in a single game, she became quite frantic to discover the mystery.
[75]
]At four o’clock in the afternoon their mother was lying down in a bedroom with a headache.
Phyl and Dolly had treated every room in the house but that large front bedroom in the same way as the drawing-room, and now they stood on the threshold of that with pale lips but determined eyes.