Miss Kezia actually smiled a grim little smile.
"How very Irish! What good would that do, when the holes would still be there? It is most tiresome! It ruins the walls! It really—good gracious! Call your dog off!—Go away!" Miss Kezia, red-faced, undignified, was striving wildly to extricate her skirt from K.K.'s teeth.
For a few moments Denis and Nell's attention was engaged elsewhere; each was rearranging assiduously the folds of the cloth. And in the middle of it Sheila Pat sat and chuckled softly.
Then Denis turned.
"K.K., drop it!" he said sternly, and K.K. obeyed with a sad little wriggle.
"It's a most objectionable dog," Miss Kezia said breathlessly. "I insist that you make no more holes in my paper!" And she marched from the room. Denis sank on to the lounge, stuffed the cushion into his mouth, and wildly waved his legs in the air.
The door reopened—Nell made a frantic dash at his legs. "Of course you understand that I will not have that guinea-pig brought into the house!" Miss Kezia said, her eyes on Denis, who at the sound of her voice dropped the cushion and sat up with a ludicrous face of dismay.
She retired once more, and for a minute there was dead silence in the room she had left. Then Nell fell into Denis's arms. "Oh—you gossoon!"
On the floor, where she had been ignominiously dumped, Sheila Pat sat in her tablecloth and hugged Kate Kearney.
Denis arose and seized her pig-tail.