"Well, she sighed neither the one nor the other. Oh, she _was_ angry! No melting of her! Next," she ticked off another finger, "we conceived, or I believe _I_ conceived, the brilliant idea of an obstacle race on the garden walls. Oh, Denis, ’tis such fun! You see, the boughs of the trees next door and the summer house are the obstacles, and then when you try to pass each other, one is always bound to topple off. I’m bruised horribly, and Sheila Pat fell into the garden next door, and then of course Molly must needs roll off—" "Into the dust-bin for a wager!" "Of course; and the tin lid smashed in, and she went in after it, and _yelled_! And I laughed so I slipped all down the wall into the garden and scraped skin off everywhere. And Aunt Kezia came out!" She stopped with a vulgar but expressive little whistle. "You see, Sheila Pat was in the garden next door; and halfway through Aunt Kezia’s lecture her head came bobbing up! That made matters hotter than before. O dear, she has got a lot of breath to waste!" "Why," inquired Denis, judicially, "weren’t you doing your lessons?" "We were. Those were the interludes. And oh, Denis, we’ve been locked into separate rooms all the afternoon till a little while ago! It was because we tried tobogganing down the stairs. We took a leaf out of the dining-room table. Aunt Kezia was out, so ’twas quite safe. It’s not at all bad, only the leaf had silly little ridges, one at each end, that caught on the stairs in jerks, so we had to put it shiny side down. Molly kept getting stuck—wedged in between the balusters and the wall, and of course she did it just when we heard Aunt Kezia’s key in the front door. It was such hard luck, because I’d tobogganed down once straight into Herr Schmidt (we hadn’t dreamt he was at home), and he didn’t mind a bit—" "He gave such a hop that all the house shook," put in Sheila Pat, with deep enjoyment. "Well, I banged right into his poor shins," said Nell, reflectively. "I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a dear old man, though he _is_ the lodger! And he sat down rather suddenly on the hall chair. We had to flee and leave the leaf wedged," she added sorrowfully. "We hoped in vain that Aunt Kezia would turn into the dining room or kitchen or somewhere, but she didn’t. Not she! She smelt that leaf! And she stumbled over it, which made it worse. And when she came to lecture us her bonnet was all crooked. _Oh_, she was in a temper! Here’s Sarah, and tea!" "How," she asked pathetically, later on, "can I feel good and sorry when she’s scolding us with _such_ a long nose? Her upper lip comes down and it drags her nose down with it. It’s like a barometer—I can always tell how her temper is by the length of her nose!" "You’ve tired the Atom out, anyway," teased Denis. Sheila Pat was on his knee: her head had lain motionless against his shoulder for the last half hour. She sat up as if worked by a wire.