The morning was warm and young; Mount Davidson's side was golden with sunflowers. On the long front piazza Mr. Madigan's canaries, in their mammoth cage, were like to burst their throats for joy in the promise of summer. Irene, every lithe muscle a-play, was hanging by her knees on the swinging-bar, her tawny hair sweeping the woodshed floor as she swung.
"Split, I say!"
The tone was commanding—such a tone as Sissy dared assume only on Saturday mornings, when her elder sister's necessities delivered Irene the Oppressor into her hands.
"Split Madigan!"
In the very exhilaration of effort—the use of her muscles was joy to her—Split paused to wish that the house might fall on Sissy; that she might suddenly become dumb; that the key to the piano might be lost—anything that would avert her own impending doom.
But none of these things happened; they never did happen, no matter how passionately the second of the Madigans longed for them on the last day of the week.
"Split—you know very well you hear me," the voice cried, coming nearer.
Split burst into song. She was a merry, merry Zingara, she declared in sweet, strong cadence, with a boisterous chorus of tra-la-las that rivaled the canaries'; and the louder she sang, the faster she swung, so that she was really half deaf and wholly giddy when she felt Sissy's hand on her ankle.
"Oh, is that you, Sissy?" she asked, sweetly surprised, peering out from under her bushy mane.
"Yes, it's me, Sissy!" Cecilia's small, round face was stern. "And you've heard me from the very first, and if you want any—"