'Was it there that you and Freddy went to look for Cassiopeia's Chair?' inquires Peggy drily; 'and were more than an hour and a half before you could find her?'
'It is so odd that I had never noticed her before,' cries Prue hastily. 'She is such a queer shape, more like a long straggling W than a chair.'
'And, after all,' continues Margaret slowly, with an uneasy smile, and not paying any heed to her sister's interpolation, 'she turned out to be in the kiosk.'
Prue is silent. The little hairy dog has brought her ruined garland back to her feet; and, holding it between his fore-paws, is painstakingly biting off each leaf and tendril, and strewing them over the close-shaven sward. The parrot is going to sleep, standing on one leg, and making a clacking noise with his beak; not a posture that one would have thought à priori conducive to slumber.
'It was not a place in which one would have expected to find a large constellation, was it?' asks Peggy, still with that same rather rueful smile, and stroking her sister's childish head as she speaks—'the darkest corner of a kiosk.'
But at that Prue leaps to her feet; and having, in the twinkling of an eye, twitched the hose out of Jacob's hand, she points it at her sister.
'Mention the word kiosk once more,' cries she desperately, and winking away a couple of tears, 'and you will not have a dry stitch upon you.'