"What's the matter, dear?" inquired the unaccustomed Miss Tripp. "Do you hear anything?"
"No, Evelyn; I don't, and the silence is suspicious. I think I'll run down stairs and see what the boys are doing. Try and rest, dear, till I call you." And Elizabeth accomplished a hasty exit by way of the back stairs and the kitchen, where she was in time to frustrate the intelligent Celia as she was about putting the French peas over to boil an hour before dinner time. From thence she sought the sitting-room, where she had left her two sons amicably engaged in constructing a tall and wobbly tower out of building blocks. Carroll had vanished, and her amazed and indignant eyes lighted upon the person of her youngest son kneeling in a chair before the forbidden aquarium, over which he leaned in a state of rapturous oblivion of past experiences, his plump hands buried in the sand at the bottom of the tank, while the alarmed gold fish flashed in and out between the dripping sleeves of his freshly-ironed blouse.
"Richard Brewster!" she cried. Then wrath and a disheartening sense of the futility of unassisted moral suasion quite swept her off her feet. She seized the child and laying him across her lap in time-honoured fashion, handed down from a remote ancestry, spanked him with a speed and thoroughness not to be surpassed by Grandmother Carroll in her most energetic mood.
VII
Elizabeth was fluttering anxiously about the table in her small dining-room when her husband entered in his usual breezy fashion and laid a bunch of fragrant carnations before her.
"A finishing touch for your table, Betty," he said; and added with lover-like enthusiasm, "My! how pretty you're looking to-night!"
"I shouldn't think I'd look pretty after the day I've put in," she told him as she arranged the flowers in water. "Sam, Mrs. Van Duser was here to luncheon."
"No?"