Rob came back dragging the chair disconsolately on its rear legs, and placing it under the doorway, mounted it, seized Kiku-san by his forepaws, and pulled him down, giving him an admonitory and chastising pat as she set him free.
"You've got to take the chair back, Prue; I'm going to help Mardy, and I can't do all the fetching and carrying," said Rob, as she descended.
"Indeed, I won't," said Prue, promptly. "You feel as much like it as I do."
Rob tossed her head and went toward the parlor without another word, and Prue departed upstairs, leaving the object of dissension where it stood. Wythie patiently picked it up and bore it away, and followed Rob to the parlor, where she and her mother were already fitting the beautiful new covering on the chair.
"It's splendid, Mardy; what a genius you are!" cried Wythie, dropping on her knees at her side of the chair. For a while they pulled and cut, and Mrs. Grey tacked in silence, except for the necessary directions. No one felt quite cheerful, nor had superfluous energy to spend in speech.
Just as one chair was nearly finished a shadow fell across its arm, and Mrs. Grey and the girls looked up to see Aunt Azraella, who had entered unheard, watching them with her sternest look of disapproval. "Ah, good-morning, Azraella," said Mrs. Grey, noting this and trying to speak brightly enough to avert its expression. "We are trying to forget the heat in the interest of hard labor."
"So I see. Aren't you forgetting something besides the heat, Mary?" said this inflexible lady.
"Why, no; are we?" asked Mrs. Grey, surprised into a hasty mental inventory of possible duties unfulfilled or engagements broken.
"Aren't you forgetting that there are more necessary things than chair-covers?" demanded Aunt Azraella. "Aren't you forgetting the state of your finances, and that you can't afford the least extravagance? How much did you pay a yard for that material?"
Rob, foreseeing this question, had been engaged in a hasty mental estimate of the original cost of the poplin and the silk. "Dollar and a quarter for the woollen stuff—one seventy-five, surely, for the brocade, when Mardy married, just—it cost precisely three dollars a yard, Aunt Azraella," she said aloud, before her mother could reply.