Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/34

 mother's room and let her tumble in the prohibited feather bed. He explored behind the big green sofa in the sitting-room, and took down all the forbidden books in his father's library to show them to her.

Nannie found him there, and summoned him to luncheon; and Miss Margaret ate beside him in an imaginary chair from a wonderful blue bowl, long since broken, which he had once had for bread and milk. He sat in such a thoughtful silence and was so unresponsive to all Nannie's kind attempts to console him, that she lost patience and accused him of sulking. He ignored her temper, so that Miss Margaret might not be disturbed by it. When they had finished their meal, he started the musical box for her, and teased the parrot in the sun of the window till "Polly" squawked and screeched and bit at the bars of the cage; and Nannie scolded them out of the room, and they raced upstairs together.

They came down with all the fire-crackers and with a lead soldier in a match-box, whom they buried deep in the garden, crooning "Nearer My God To Thee" with no sense of irreverence. They split all Don's elderberry guns firing funeral salvos of crackers from them; and they blew up a fort with a "cannon" cracker and annihilated a whole regiment of men. No one came to disturb them until they began to set off pin-wheels and Roman candles in mid-afternoon; then Nannie interfered, and they ran into the house laughing rebelliously, and shut themselves in the play-room again.

"Well," Nannie complained to the cook, "his lickin' ain't done him any good."