'What a colour you've got, Miss Palliser!' said Lucy Dobbs, 'and how your eyes sparkle! You look as if you'd just had a hamper.'
'I'm not quite so greedy as you, Lucy,' retorted Ida; 'I don't think a hamper would make my eyes sparkle, even if there were anybody to send me one.'
'But there is somebody to send you one,' argued Lucy, with her mouth full of bread and butter; 'your father isn't dead?'
'No.'
'Then he might send you a hamper.'
'He might, if he lived within easy reach of Mauleverer Manor,' replied
Ida; 'but as he lives in France—'
'He could send a post-office order to a confectioner in London, and the confectioner would send you a big box of cakes, and marmalade, and jam, and mixed biscuits, and preserved ginger,' said Lucy, her cheeks glowing with the rapture of her theme. 'That is what my mamma and papa did, when they were in Switzerland, on my birthday. I never had such a hamper as that one. I was ill for a week afterwards.'
'And I suppose you were very glad your mother and father were away,' said
Ida, while the other children laughed in chorus.
'It was a splendid hamper,' said Lucy, stolidly. 'I shall never forget it. So you see your father might send you a hamper,' she went on, for the sake of argument, 'though he is in France.'
'Certainly,' said Ida, 'if I were not too old to care about cakes and jam.'