Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/4



" wouldn't dare!"

"Wouldn't I? That's all you know!"

"You mustn't dare her," said a third voice anxiously from the top of the library steps; "if you dare her she'll do it as sure as Fate."

The one who must not be dared looked up and laughed. The golden light of midsummer afternoon falling through the tall library windows embroidered new patterns on the mellow Persian carpets, and touched to a dusky splendour the shelves on shelves of old calf and morocco, where here and there gilded lettering shone like rows of little sparks. It touched also the hair of the girl who must not be dared; she sat cross-legged on the floor among a heap of books, nursing a fat quarto volume with onyx-inlaid clasps and bosses, and touched the hair into glory, turning it from plain brown, which was its everyday colour, to a red gold halo which became her small white face very well.

"Fate, indeed!" she said. "Why, the whole thing's Fate. Emmeline asks us here—good old Emmy!—because we'd nowhere to go when everybody got mumps. I shall always respect mumps for getting us this extra month's holiday. I wish it had a prettier name—Mompessa, or something like that; we have the time of our lives amid all this ancestral splendour." She indicated the great beams and tall windows of the library with a gesture full of appreciation. "No, don't interrupt. I'm telling the story. Angel Emmeline protects us from the footman and doesn't let the butler