"Wait, sir! Oh, certainly, sir!" teasingly said Chris, bowing almost in two while Mark ruefully rubbed his shins.
"Oh, boys, don't quarrel! Let us sit quiet and talk about the other Carews!" Clary plaintively pleaded. "Don't you think we could somehow get them to my birthday party?"
The little sister was tucked away in the old rocking-chair in a corner, safely out of the way of the line of march of her wild brothers. She was a frail, small mortal, with long, smooth, yellow hair and anxious blue eyes, just the apple of everybody's eye in the Tile House.
"Father and Uncle George have never spoken to one another for three whole years. Everybody in Allonby Edge knows that, and so do you, Clary! Is it likely that the other Carews would be allowed to come to your birthday party—is it now, I ask?" Oliver, the eldest, put his hands in his pockets, and stood with his back to the empty fireplace, secretly flattering himself that even Father could not strike a more manly attitude.
It was Saturday—a pouring wet Saturday—and the boys were house-prisoners. They had struggled through every indoor game they knew, starting with a pillow-fight before the beds were made, to the tearful wrath of old Euphemia, who kept Dr. John Carew's house because the sweet-faced Mother, whom the children adored so, was ill and frail most of her days.
When in the pillow-fray a bolster burst and the feathers thickly snowed the staircase and hall, Euphemia's wrath boiled over, and the boys, with Clary also, were sternly hustled upstairs to the play-room, there to be locked in until the dinner-bell should release them. Peace at any price Euphemia was determined to have.
"You don't think they can get into mischief locked in—there's the window, you know, Euphemia," nervously said Mother. It was one of the poor lady's particularly bad days, and she was shut up in her own room.
"No, mem, there's no fear. Not even such wild little reskels as ours would climb out o' that high window, an' there ain't no other outlet save it be the chimney. Not that I'd be surprised to see 'em one after another creep out o' the chimney-pot black as black!" Euphemia, with her head in the air, walked off muttering.
However, as the morning wore on and a wondrous quiet reigned at the top of the house, where the boys were engaged in painting fearsome animals and golliwogs on the jambs of the mantelpiece, Euphemia relented.