Sure enough, there was an awful to-do, especially when they found Amerye playing sweep in her mother's nice clean bed with pink hangings. Kitty and Amerye were sent to bed without any supper except a bit of dry bread, and Rosamond, not having done anything particular to herself—trust her not to make herself ugly!—was scolded for having allowed Kitty to cut her own hair all crooked across the forehead. Only Mrs. Gilmour, the grown-up lady who had helped it all on, got off without a scolding, as they always do.
I was scolded for one or two little things I had done while Auntie May was away, and especially for the packet of tapestry nails or pins, whatever you do call the horrid things that I shall never see again without a shudder and feeling myself all over.
'I tell you what, May,' said Beatrice. 'I am resigned to Loki's passing his nose over everything, reading postcards and docketing bills and superintending the post generally, but when it comes to opening my parcels for me, I do think it is too much. There were, I believe, a thousand nails in that packet he demolished. I can't fag to count them over now, but if their number is incomplete, I should say that the balance was in your cat's stomach. He knows, probably.'
I did not know, they were such trifling, two-penny-halfpenny things that one of them might easily have stuck to my tongue in turning them over. The dread saddened my last days at Crook Hall.
On the whole it had been a very pleasant time. They had made me quite one of the family, allowing me to share their meals, their pains, their scoldings, and their games. No one could beat me at romps, but in the six-to-seven, when they played card games, I was a little out of it. There was the 'Kings of England' that Auntie May and Beatrice always quarrelled over, and the 'Flower Loto' in which Auntie May, not being a country person, seemed such a muff, and the 'Towns' game where Rosamond was such a dab because of her good memory, and the 'Pictures in the National Gallery' which was the one Kitty liked best. She was pretty quick, but she made such a hash of the pronunciation of the names of the pictures that the others laughed at her, and yet she generally won. She would say, very politely, because she knew she could not pronounce it:
'Will you give me please, Rosamond, the Fighting—oh dear, I can hardly pernounce it—the Fighting Temenare, by Turner?'
'The Fighting Temeraire, I suppose you mean, Kitty,' Rosamond would reply chillingly, not even troubling to say that she hadn't got it. 'Infant Samuel, Amerye? Look sharp!'
'Ain't got him, my dear child. Kitty, Infant Samuel?'
'Not at home, I regret to say. Rosamond, will you, if you please, give me Dignity and Imperence, by Landseer, unless it is the one I see you have just let fall into the wasperbasket.'
'I can give you Dignity,' said Rosamond, forking it up out of the wastepaper basket, where, sure enough, it was where Kitty said it had fallen. 'And you have got the other, haven't you, already?'