It happened that just then Jasper had developed a mania for collecting smooth, round stones, and Alison had suggested he should form an ammunition dump to supply the Strachans’ machine-gun. This dump he was allowed to build near the stumpy little low oak table on casters that had supported the doll’s house from the time it was first built. Mummy had carefully explained to him that he must on no account throw the stones at anything, because Jasper came of three generations of left-hand bowlers, and had already shown that he could throw a ball in the direction he wanted it to go. So far he had never thrown a stone either at things or people, for he was a kind little soul and no more disobedient than the generality of small boys of three. But he carried a stone in his hand all day long unless Nannie discovered it and took it from him. He liked the feel of it, its smoothness, its roundness, its vast potentialities.
That night he had been shooed away from the doll’s house half a dozen times, for Alison and George were absorbed in a thrilling play in which the Strachans captured a German spy who was guiding enemy air-craft by means of forbidden lights.
Just as the “Archies” were barking their loudest, and an unmistakable bomb dropped somewhere, Jasper, on the other side of the room, gave a whoop and let fly the stone he had in his left hand straight at the doll’s-house roof. It took one of the wooden chimneys broadside on and broke it clean off, narrowly missing the massed heads of his two sisters and George, which were luckily almost inside the house absorbed in the spy drama.
It also cracked some of the neat little slates on the roof.
There was a general consternation and excitement, and Jasper scurried across the room to secure another stone from the dump, when he would have undoubtedly had a shot at the other chimney had not Nannie caught him and held him tight.
Then it was that Alison astonished her family, for instead of demanding instant and condign punishment for her destructive little brother, she danced about the room and burst into poetry, shouting at the top of her voice:
The Strachans are in the War Zone, their house has been hit,
They’ve caught a bad spy and they’re all done their bit.
“She’s a most onaccountable child, Miss Alison,” said Nannie to cook next day; “she was actually sorry that the stone didn’t go right through the roof, an’ you’d have thought she’d have gone on ever so ... anyway, it kept them from caring much about the raid.”