"Oh, don't be so tiresome!" broke in Betty, who always understood things a little quicker than her brother—or if not, pretended she did. "Can't you fancy an enemy? Men in armour, or lions, or Nurse when she wants us to be put to bed."
John did not answer, being a little sulky. Of course he could imagine enemies just as well as his sisters; worse ones perhaps, with longer spears and sharper teeth! And he did not like being considered silly.
"What I think," continued Madge, who was accustomed to talk through interruptions, so that she hardly noticed them; "what I think is that we ought to make a kind of house up in a big tree, so high that no grown-up people can possibly climb to it, and if we tumbled out we should break our legs."
"I am afraid none of the garden trees will do," said Betty thoughtfully, as she pondered over the required qualifications.
"Did I say it was to be in the garden?" snapped out Madge. "It will be in the fields—the farthest part of the fields. And," she added, leaning forward and whispering mysteriously, "I know the tree."
"Oh, which is it? Where is it?" shouted the twins. John's sulks at once gave place to his curiosity.
"It's the beech-tree by the wall at the end of the Pig's Field," announced Madge. "I have examined it, and it will do exactly."
"You do have such good plans!" murmured Betty admiringly. Indeed, an elder sister who can work out a project of this sort in her head without saying a word to anyone, is a member of the family of whom one may feel justly proud.
"But I hope there's a place for me in this grand tree of yours," observed John, in the accent of complaint that was rather habitual to him. "Because, if I've got to sit on the ground as I do here, and the enemy comes, it won't be very nice for me; though of course you two will be all right, so you won't care!" and he crushed the bay leaves viciously under his feet until the air became quite aromatic.
"If you would only listen to me instead of grumbling you would hear my whole plan," observed Madge, very reasonably. "We shall not sit on branches as we have always done before, we will build a house by putting sticks for a floor. A sort of huge nest, with lots of room for us all. Of course, if we build it ourselves, we can make it just as large or as small as we like."