CHAPTER X
ST. PATRICK'S DAY AND THE FIRST OF APRIL
The Misses Clark had borrowed Elisabeth for the afternoon. It was becoming a custom with them, and as Miss Merriam insisted that her little charge should have her naps out of doors with unbroken regularity, the old ladies found themselves almost every day sitting, rug-enwrapped, on Mrs. Smith's veranda or their own while the baby dozed luxuriously in her carriage. Elisabeth grew pink in the fresh air and if her self-appointed attendants did not do likewise they at least found themselves benefiting by the unaccustomed treatment.
In early March a brother came to visit them. He was a dignified elderly man, "just like the sisters before Elisabeth made them human," Roger declared, "except that he has whiskers a foot long." At first he paid no attention to the child, though the story of its escape from Belgium interested him. But no one resisted Elisabeth long and it was not many days before Mr. Clark was holding his book with one hand and playing ball with the other.
On this particular day Mrs. Smith and Miss Merriam had both needed to go to New York, and the Misses Clark had seized the opportunity to have an unusually long call from Ayleesabet. They had sat on their veranda with her while she napped; but when she came in, fresh and wide awake, their older eyes were growing sleepy from the cold and they went upstairs for forty winks, leaving their nursling in charge of their brother.
Ayleesabet was goodness itself. She sat on the floor and rolled a ball to her elderly playmate, chuckling when it struck the edge of a rug and went out of its course so that he had to plunge after it. She walked around the edge of the same rug, evidently regarding it as an island to be explored, Crusoe fashion. Her explorations were thorough. If she had been old enough to know what mines were one would have thought that she was playing miner, for she lay on her back, pushed up the rug and rolled under it.
"Upon my word," ejaculated Mr. Clark, adjusting his spectacles and examining the hump made by the baby's round little Belgian body. "Upon my word, that doesn't seem the thing for her to do."
But Elisabeth seemed entirely contented and made no response to the old gentleman's cluckings and other blandishments.