"What's the matter?" asked Sissy. An old look, that washed all the self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.
Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a martyr.
Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young lives flowed full and free.
But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.
Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall, old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City, Nevada, California, U. S. A."
"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.
"Well,—" Kate had been thinking,—"I'm Miss Madigan."
"Whoop—hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed it obligingly into Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.
"Girls—it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in the quantity of material before her.
"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin, she began to put them on.