Sylvia went up to her and gave her a sudden, violent slap between the
shoulders. "Now, don't begin!" she said. "If you do, they'll all come
round us. It isn't as if we could rush away to the middle of the moors,
and you could go on with it as long as you liked. Here, if you howl,
you'll catch it; for they'll stand over you, and perhaps fling water on
your head."
"Leave me alone, then, for a minute," said Betty. She flung herself flat
on the ground, face downwards, her hair falling about her shoulders. She
lay as still as though she were carved in stone. The twin girls watched
her for a minute. Then very softly and carefully Sylvia approached the
prone figure, pushed her hand into Betty's pocket (a very coarse,
ordinary pocket it was, put in at the side of her dress by Jean's own
fingers), and took out a bunch of keys.
Sylvia held up the keys with a glad smile. "Now let's begin," she said.
"It's an odious, grandified room, and Betty'll go mad here; but we can't
help it--at least, for a bit. And there's always the packet."
At these words, to the great relief of her younger sisters, Betty stood
upright. "There's always the packet," she said. "Now let's begin to
unpack."
Notwithstanding the fact that there were six deal trunks--six trunks of
the plainest make, corded with the coarsest rope--there was very little
inside them, at least as far as an ordinary girl's wardrobe is
concerned; for Miss Frances Vivian had been very poor, and during the
last year of her life had lived at Craigie Muir in the strictest
economy. She was, moreover, too ill to be greatly troubled about the
girls' clothing; and by and by, as her illness progressed, she left the
matter altogether to Jean. Jean was to supply what garments the young
ladies required, and Jean set about the work with a right good will. So
the coarsest petticoats, the most clumsy stockings, the ugliest jackets
and blouses and skirts imaginable, presently appeared out of the little
wooden trunks.
The girls sorted them eagerly, putting them pell-mell into the drawers
without the slightest attempt at any sort of order. But if there were
very few clothes in the trunks, there were all sorts of other things.
There were boxes full of caterpillars in different stages of chrysalis
form. There was also a glass box which contained an enormous spider.
This was Sylvia's special property. She called the spider Dickie, and
adored it. She would not give it flies, which she considered cruel, but
used to keep it alive on morsels of raw meat. Every day, for a quarter
of an hour, Dickie was allowed to take exercise on a flat stone on the
edge of the moor. It was quite against even Jean Macfarlane's advice
that Dickie was brought to the neighborhood of London. But he was here.
He had borne his journey apparently well, and Sylvia looked at him now
with worshiping eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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