"'Oh, that's the bed—that's the very bed you told me about, dear Mrs. Denny—the bed I did so want to sleep in. Thank you so much for remembering about it. Oh, how beautiful it is—I shouldn't mind being ill if I was in that bed.'
"It really was a rather wonderful bed. It was a regular four-poster, if you know what that is—a bed with wooden posts at each corner, and curtains running all round, so that once you were inside it, you could if you liked draw them so close that it was like being in a tent."
"I know," said Maudie, "I've seen beds like that. But I don't think Hoodie and the boys have—let me see; oh yes, I can tell them what it's like. It's like the bed in our best doll-house—the one with pink curtains trimmed with white. You know?"
"Yes," said Hoodie, "the one where Miss Victoria has been so ill in, since she's got too ugly to sit in the drawing-room. I know."
"But it's such a weeny bed," said Hec, "was zour little girl no bigger than zat little dolly, Cousin Magdalen?"
"Of course," said Maudie, hastily. "How stupid you are, Hec."
"Maudie," said her godmother, and Maudie got very red. "Maudie meant it was the same shape as that, but much bigger, Hec dear. Just the same as the piano in the study is the same shape as the one in the doll-house, only much bigger."
"Oh zes," said Hec.
"A great deal bigger than any of the beds people have now," continued Magdalen. "It was really big enough to have held six little Lenas instead of one. But it was the curtains that made it so particularly wonderful. They were very old, but the colours were still quite bright, they had been washed so carefully. And the pattern was something I really could not describe if I tried—it was the most delicious muddle of flowers, and trailing leaves and birds, and here and there a sort of little basket-work pattern that looked like a summer-house or the entrance to a grotto.
"Lena stood feasting her eyes upon these marvellous curtains.