"Well, my boy, perhaps rather more than I ought, seeing it's very apt to be at other folks' expense."
The guest, mamma and Elsie having been helped, it was now Vi's turn to claim papa's attention.
"What shall I send you, daughter?" he asked.
"Oh nothing, papa, please! no, no, I can't eat live things," she said half shuddering.
"It is not alive my child."
Violet looked utterly bewildered: she had never known her father to say anything that was not perfectly true, yet how could she disbelieve the evidence of her own senses?
"Papa, could it hollow so loud when it was dead?" she asked deprecatingly.
"It did not, my little darling; 'twas I," said Cousin Ronald, preventing papa's reply, "the chick seemed to make the noise but it was really I."
Papa and mamma both confirmed this statement and the puzzled child consented to partake of the mysterious fowl.
Minna, standing with her basket of keys at the back of her mistress's chair, Tom and Prilla, waiting on the table, had been as much startled and mystified by the chicken's sudden outcry as Vi herself, and seized with superstitious fears, turned almost pale with terror.