Here is a party in a parlour not quite so pleasant. Yet the room is beautiful, and the ladies and gentlemen who stand around the table playing ping-pong are well-dressed, and all look happy and gay. And here again she paused a minute, to gaze into a room in which were five or six fair-haired and pretty young children, each engaged in some parlour game, a big black cat right in the centre of the table, and a hobby-horse in one corner of the room—it was as good as a pantomime. Then came a great house with great windows, brilliantly lighted with flittering balls of electric lamps. It was a hotel dining-room, and those were the guests all sitting at the dozens of tables, looking like kings and queens. Waiters bringing silver trays glided hither and thither, and on the snow-white table-cloth lay silver and gold dishes, and sparkling glasses, and flowers of every hue. Peggy sighed again, but could not even yet say why she did so.
She turned and came slowly back. But she increased her speed when she came in sight of her own little cosy camp, the tent lit up and as white as linen, the lights streaming from the caravan windows. She sighed no longer.
One night, when everybody was out of the camp, save old Molly and herself, Peggy sat at the tent table. And Peggy felt very sad, for Kammie, her weird, old-world pet, had been ailing for weeks, and had got thinner and thinner, and colder and colder. He had taken no food, and when placed on the grass he hardly moved. Indeed, when laid on his side he scarcely cared to wriggle into a more comfortable position. He was on his little branch of wood, and had gone to sleep with one arm raised, which he did not seem to have the strength to take down again.
Peggy had been sitting in the tent for hours watching him. She did not even want to play. Presently she got up, and, followed by Ralph, walked down the winding pathway that led from the sea-road and shingle to the camp. She leaned over the gate, and as she did so noticed a figure advancing. She was a little timid, but Ralph gave voice at once to a welcoming bay, and sprang forward to place two friendly paws on Johnnie’s shoulder.
“Oh, Johnnie,” she said, when he got close to her; “poor Kammie.”
“Not dead?”
“No; maybe not dead, but I’m sure he is going home.”
Then the innocent child began to sob and cry in her handkerchief.
Johnnie and she covered the cage up that night. They could not bear to see their favourite so very white and with so little colour in his tail.
Next morning the change came. Kammie was dead in reality now. The wonderful circular, brown, wrinkled eyelids that had always been a bonnie brown were black. The sides only of the body were jet black, every other part pale, white almost as snow, only about the gills a sunset glow of red. The tail was speckled yellow and gray.