“Hark, a doleful voice from the tombs,” cried Merry, who always made it an excuse to hunt for something in the parlor when Billie appeared.
“It’s the truth,” complained Nancy. “If you would just keep still two minutes at a time, I wouldn’t have to give up my Saturdays slaving for you.”
“‘When I hear the music play, I can’t keep right still,’” sang Merry, executing a double shuffle on the floor to a jig tune Elinor had struck up.
“You’ll have to dance to a different tune when you go to Annapolis,” cried Nancy. “And who’ll do your darning there?”
“Don’t borrow trouble, Nancy,” answered her brother. “Perform your daily task and cease to murmur. You’ll be a professional grumbler like Belle Rogers if you keep on.”
“Do you know that she and her whole family are denouncing me as a sort of would-be murderer?” put in Billie. “All because I lost Ben and the rest of you at the Shell Island fire and took her into the wrong room.”
“I heard that she was an early Christian martyr who had come near to being burned at the stake,” said Merry.
“Yes,” continued Billie, “she tells how I enticed her into the room, and then climbed up onto the roof and left her, so that she had to follow and she even blames me because she would slide down the rope first and cut her hands so that she will never be able to play the piano. I am very sorry for that, because she liked music, but it was her own fault.”
“It’s really making a sort of split-up in the town,” observed Elinor. “Mrs. Rogers and mamma almost had words on the subject the other day. As much as mamma will ever have words with any one. Mrs. Rogers tried to tell her that Belle was going one way and you made her go another, and all mamma said was, ‘My dear Julia, I have heard the correct version of the story,’ and swept away.”
“Exactly as you will do, Elinor, when you begin to wear long dresses,” said Nancy.