'No,' she said. 'The parrot's mistress is an old maid—not nearly as old as I am, all the same, but she lives quite alone; and on the other side there are two brothers and a sister, quite young, unmarried people.'
'And is the—the little girl the only little girl or boy in her house?' asked Peterkin.
He did stumble a bit over asking it, for it had been very plain that Mrs. Wylie did not want to speak about her; but I got quite hot when I heard him, and if we had been on the same side of the table, or if his legs had been as long as they are now, I'd have given him a good kick to shut him up.
Our old lady was too good-natured to mind; still, there was something in her manner when she answered that stopped any more questions from Pete.
'Yes,' she said, 'there are no other children in that house, or in the terrace, except some very tiny ones, almost babies, at the other end. I see them pass in their perambulators, dear little things.'
It was quite dark by the time we had finished tea, and the lamps were lighted upstairs in the drawing-room, where Mrs. Wylie showed us some of the curiosities and things that I have already written about.
They were rather interesting, but I think we've got to care more for collections and treasures like that, now, than we did then. Perhaps we were not quite old enough, and, I daresay, it was a good deal that the great reason we liked to go to Mrs. Wylie's was because of the parrot and the mysterious little girl. At least, Peterkin's head was full of the little girl. I myself was beginning to get rather tired of all his talk about her, and I thought the parrot very good fun of himself.
So when the clock struck six, and Mrs. Wylie asked us if mamma had fixed any time for us to be home by—it wasn't that she wanted to get rid of us, but she was very afraid of keeping us too late—we thought we might as well go, for mamma had said, 'soon after six.'
'Is any one coming to fetch you?' Mrs. Wylie said.
I didn't quite like her asking that: it made me seem so babyish. I was quite old enough to look after Pete, and the fun of going home by ourselves through the lighted-up streets was one of the things we had looked forward to.