“Cat!” said the cook. “There’s cats enough and to spare, goodness knows, but cats don’t browse on scones and cream-puffs. It’s two-legged cats, or my name’s not Mary Ann Spinks—you mark my words, Elizer! Not that I’d mention names, nor even red ’air; but I have me suspicions!”
“Red hair!” ejaculated Eliza. “You aren’t thinking of Lucy Armitage? Her that’s a prefect?”
“I am not,” said the cook. “Prefeck or no prefeck, that one ’ud never ’ave spirit enough to come a-raidin’ anyone’s pantry. Not that I ’old with raidin’, Elizer, ’specially when it’s me own pantry. But I was young meself once, an’ I remember there was an apple-tree me an’ me brothers used to visit. Not our own apple-tree. I ’ave me memories. The apples weren’t any too good, ’specially as we always collared ’em green. It wasn’t ’ardly the apples we cared for, but the fun of it. Ah, well, one’s only young once, an’ the school food ain’t any too good either, as I well know.” The cook sighed, and apparently gave herself up to her memories.
“But raiding’s just stealing!” said Eliza, whose youth held no such recollections of buccaneering. She regarded the fat cook with a cold and disapproving eye.
“Not when you’re young it ain’t,” defended the cook.
“Well, I don’t see any difference,” Eliza stated. “Don’t the collect say to keep one’s hands from picking and stealing?”
“Ah, the collecks!” said the cook. “Them as wrote the collecks weren’t young, either. ’Tisn’t all of us lives up to ’em all the time—until we grow up, of course, that’s to say.”
Eliza was thinking deeply.
“Red hair!” she murmured. “Young Robin Hurst has red hair, and so has Annette Riley. Is it either of them you’re thinking of, Cook?”
“I’m not thinkin’ of anyone in particular,” averred the cook, definitely. “Not my business to think. Wot you an’ I ’ave got to bend our minds to is Miss Stone, an’ wot she’s goin’ to say when she finds there’s no cream-puffs for her party.”