“Oh, well, it’ll be an uncle or a cousin,” they said, and ran on painting the brilliant future life they would lead, in colours as glowing as they had painted the other days dun.
It was on the first day that Phyl was up again that [85] ]they actually learned the great news. At tea-time Mrs. Conway ran into the nursery for a moment. She had been busy with the lawyer most of the afternoon, and now he and her own brother were staying for the evening that yet more business might be talked.
“I want you all to be very quiet and good,” she said; “play here all the time, Phyl mustn’t be in the draughts, and no one is to come running into the breakfast-room under any pretext.”
“Mayn’t we even come to dessert?” said Dolly. This had always been their privilege.
“There is no dessert,” said the mother. “There is nothing but a very small leg of mutton, and an apple-pie, and some custards. Tell Harriet, Dolly, to look in the store-room, I think there is just one more pot of red currant-jelly for the meat.”
She went to the door, then came back; her cheeks were flushed, her crinkly hair pushed back from her forehead as if with much and difficult thinking.
“Before you go to bed to-night you shall know everything,” she said; “till then be good little chickies, and don’t let me see a bit of you.”
But there were four hours to bed-time,—how could they make the time endurable, confined within the limits of these four walls?
Yet on ordinary occasions it was a most resourceful room.
It was fairly large and well lighted, with a window [86] ]that had what all nurseries should have,—a deep, broad window-seat. Of necessary furniture there was nothing beyond a table, four or five chairs, an old horse-hair sofa, and two large cupboards. And all of it, by the earnest request of the three remaining inhabitants, was crowded down to one end, in order to leave the other quite bare for play. Phyl and Dolly had begged an old clothes-horse, and had coaxed Harriet into nailing some material over it. The big corner it had screened off from the room was entirely sacred to them; and Weenie, when they retired within it and extended no invitation to her, had no other course left but to stay outside and make a disturbing noise. For she was such a destructive small morsel that Mr. and Mrs. Conway, in the interests of the two to whom dolls were living breathing beings and the centres of passionate affections, had been obliged to join the coalition against her in this respect, and say she must not touch that corner without permission. They sought to recompense her for the interdict by giving her boxes of wooden and tin soldiers, boats and horses, and they begged the two elder little maids to be unselfish and not abuse the privilege.