"Because you are afraid he will catch you and punish you as you deserve, if he's at home, I suppose, you bad children."
"Not at all," said Angelica. "It's because he looks so unsafe on a horse; you never know what'll happen."
"It's a kind of a last chance," said Diavolo, "and that makes it exciting."
"But wouldn't you be very sorry if your father died?" Evadne asked.
The twins looked at each other doubtfully.
"Should we?" Diavolo said to Angelica.
"I wonder?" said Angelica.
One wet day they chose to paint in Evadne's room because they could not go out. She found pictures, and got everything ready for them good-naturedly, and then they sat themselves down at a little table opposite each other; but the weather affected their spirits, and made them both fractious. They wanted the same picture to begin with, and only settled the question by demolishing it in their attempts to snatch it from each other. Then there was only one left between them, but happily they remembered that artists sometimes work at the same picture, and it further occurred to them that it would be an original method—or "funny," as they phrased it—for one of them to work at it wrong side up. So Angelica daubed the sky blue on her side of the table, and Diavolo flung green on the fields from his. They had large genial mouths at that time, indefinite noses, threatening to turn up a little, and bright dark eyes, quick glancing, but with no particular expression in them—no symptom either of love or hate, nothing but living interest. It was pretty to see Diavolo's fair head touching Angelica's dark one across the little table; but when it came too close Angelica would dunt it sharply out of the way with her own, which was apparently the harder of the two, and Diavolo would put up his hand and rub the spot absently. He was too thoroughly accustomed to such sisterly attentions to be altogether conscious of them.
The weather darkened down.
"I wish I could see," he grumbled.