The concluding cough was so successfully convulsive that Robbie Belle’s mouth opened suddenly.
“It must be something important,” she said.
Berta woke up from her trance. “Come!” she called.
At the first breath of the syllable, the door flew open with a specially prepared bang, and Bea shot in with an instantaneous and voluntary velocity that carried her to the centre of the rug.
“Oh, girls!” she exclaimed in the excited tone of a breathless and delighted messenger bringing great and astonishing news, “it’s raining!”
In the ensuing stillness, she could almost hear the disgusted thud of expectation dashed to earth.
“Villain!” said Berta, and swung around to her interrupted poem.
Robbie’s puzzled stare developed slowly into a smile. “I think that is a joke,” she said.
Then Bea laughed. She collapsed on the sofa and shook from her boots to her curls. It was contagious laughter that made Robbie chuckle in sympathy and Berta grin broadly at a discreet pigeon-hole of her desk. When the visitor resumed sufficient self-possession to enable her to enunciate, she sat up and inquired anxiously,
“Did you hear me sing?”