“I won’t, if it frightens you,” said Sylvie.
“Flightens me!” Bruno exclaimed indignantly. “It isn’t that! It’s ’cause ‘nubbly’ ’s such a grumbly word to say—when one person’s got her head on another person’s shoulder. When she talks like that,” he explained to me, “the talking goes down bofe sides of my face—all the way to my chin—and it doos tickle so! It’s enough to make a beard grow, that it is!”
He said this with great severity, but it was evidently meant for a joke: so Sylvie laughed—a delicious musical little laugh, and laid her soft cheek on the top of her brother’s curly head, as if it were a pillow, while she went on with the story. “So this Boy——”
“But it wasn’t me, oo know!” Bruno interrupted. “And oo needn’t try to look as if it was, Mister Sir!”
I represented, respectfully, that I was trying to look as if it wasn’t.
“—he was a middling good Boy——”
“He were a welly good Boy!” Bruno corrected her. “And he never did nothing he wasn’t told to do——”
“That doesn’t make a good Boy!” Sylvie said contemptuously.
“That do make a good Boy!” Bruno insisted.
Sylvie gave up the point. “Well, he was a very good Boy, and he always kept his promises, and he had a big cupboard——”