"What's a secret breakfast?" asked Mollie.
"You'll see in a minute," Prue answered. "It's a lovely thing. Then we'll get up and pull the cherries and cut them open, and we can pick the roses afterwards, when they are warm and dry."
"Then we had better get the things ready now," said Grizzel.
So while Hugh went off to a little old hut, which served them for a playroom, to build up his distillery, the three girls set out to inspect the cherry trees, and engaged in the pleasing task of tasting a few cherries off each tree to decide which had the finest flavour.
"I think they are all absolutely topping," said Mollie. "I don't know how you can tell which is best."
"What funny words you use," said Grizzel. "Topping!"
"Well—top-hole then, or ripping, or great, or first-class, or jolly good."
Both hearers laughed. "You had better not let Miss Hilton hear you," said Prue, "or she will tell Mamma, and then you will have to write out 'topping' a hundred times."
Grizzel led the way to the flower-garden, which was laid out on the terrace immediately below the cottage. A sanded path ran along by the rose-bed, which was banked up for two feet or so to keep the soil from washing down in the rainy season. Prudence and Grizzel stopped at a corner where, in a sheltered angle, lay a low pile of bricks built up four-square with a hollow centre.
"This is our fire-place," Prue explained to Mollie. "When we get up very early we make a fire here and boil tea and have a secret breakfast, because proper breakfast isn't till nine o'clock when Miss Hilton is mistress, and we get so hungry—besides, it is a lark."