“I hate it,” burst out Rosie. “I hate every single thing you like, Laura. But I’m glad you like it because then I don’t have to do it.” Rosie poured the popper-full of white corn into a big brown bowl. “Now don’t all grab at once!” She commanded, as a half-a-dozen eager hands reached towards the table. “Wait until I pour melted butter on it. That makes it perfectly _scrumptious_! There you are! Now each one of you take a plate, and spoon the corn out on it.” The bowl passed rapidly from hand to hand. Rosie embedded her sharp little teeth into the shining coral of a Baldwin apple. “Oh what a good apple!” she said. “What did you enjoy most, Silva?” Maida asked curiously, her mouth full of popcorn. “Oh, living in a house!” Silva answered instantly. “You don’t know what fun that is to me. All my life I have lived either in a tent or a wagon. All my life I have longed to live in a house with lace curtains in the windows. How I love that little room of mine I can’t tell you! And yet at first--Do you know--I was afraid I couldn’t stand it? It seemed as though the walls were pressing in on me and I couldn’t get enough air. Many and many a night, I got up and went downstairs in the middle of the night and slept in the hammock. Sometimes I felt like a bird in a cage--as if I was beating my wings the way I’ve seen birds do.” “I’ve never got quite used to it,” Tyma confessed. “Sometimes, even now I have to get up in the middle of the night and go out and sleep on the grass.” “My!” Rosie exclaimed. “I should think that would be a hard bed. What have you enjoyed most, Harold?” “Oh going all over the country on my bicycle,” Harold explained. “You see always before we have gone to Marblehead Neck and you always have to go so far before you come to any new country. But here you start out in any direction and you are somewhere else before you know it.” The little children who, as the popcorn approached the eating point, had been lured out of the room, now came in to say good night. As usual they were rebellious about going to bed; but were comforted by the promise of a long train-ride next Sunday. As Arthur tactfully concealed the popcorn under his chair and Tyma mimicking him, shoved the apples under the couch, the good nights were effected without tragedy. “How well they all look!” Maida said proudly. “They are as freckled and sun-burned as they can be and fat as little butterballs!” CHAPTER XXVI PROMISE “What are you going to do in the winter, Maida?” Rosie asked. “I don’t know,” Maida answered. “Father hasn’t made up his mind yet and it all depends of course upon what he is going to do.” “Then if he went to Europe, you’d go too?” “Yes,” Maida admitted. “But I don’t think we’ll go to Europe. At least,” she added conscientiously, “he hasn’t said we would. I don’t know what we’ll do.” “But if you don’t go to Europe, will you go to school?” Silva asked. “I don’t know,” Maida responded. “Perhaps I’ll have a governess.”