“Well, I’ll be—­jiggered!” said Uncle Roger.

“I knew he never went out of the door,” cried Dan triumphantly.

When the last buggy had driven away, Felicity set a batch of bread, and the rest of us sat around the back porch steps in the cat’s light and ate cherries, shooting the stones at each other.  Cecily was in quest of information.

“What does ‘it never rains but it pours’ mean?”

“Oh, it means if anything happens something else is sure to happen,” said the Story Girl.  “I’ll illustrate.  There’s Mrs. Murphy.  She never had a proposal in her life till she was forty, and then she had three in the one week, and she was so flustered she took the wrong one and has been sorry ever since.  Do you see what it means now?”

“Yes, I guess so,” said Cecily somewhat doubtfully.  Later on we heard her imparting her newly acquired knowledge to Felicity in the pantry.

“‘It never rains but it pours’ means that nobody wants to marry you for ever so long, and then lots of people do.”

CHAPTER XIV.  FORBIDDEN FRUIT

We were all, with the exception of Uncle Roger, more or less grumpy in the household of King next day.  Perhaps our nerves had been upset by the excitement attendant on Jimmy Patterson’s disappearance.  But it is more likely that our crankiness was the result of the supper we had eaten the previous night.  Even children cannot devour mince pie, and cold fried pork ham, and fruit cake before going to bed with entire impunity.  Aunt Janet had forgotten to warn Uncle Roger to keep an eye on our bedtime snacks, and we ate what seemed good unto us.

Some of us had frightful dreams, and all of us carried chips on our shoulders at breakfast.  Felicity and Dan began a bickering which they kept up the entire day.  Felicity had a natural aptitude for what we called “bossing,” and in her mother’s absence she deemed that she had a right to rule supreme.  She knew better than to make any attempt to assert authority over the Story Girl, and Felix and I were allowed some length of tether; but Cecily, Dan, and Peter were expected to submit dutifully to her decrees.  In the main they did; but on this particular morning Dan was plainly inclined to rebel.  He had had time to grow sore over the things that Felicity had said to him when Jimmy Patterson was thought lost, and he began the day with a flatly expressed determination that he was not going to let Felicity rule the roost.

It was not a pleasant day, and to make matters worse it rained until late in the afternoon.  The Story Girl had not recovered from the mortifications of the previous day; she would not talk, and she would not tell a single story; she sat on Rachel Ward’s chest and ate her breakfast with the air of a martyr.  After breakfast she washed the dishes and did the bed-room work in grim silence; then, with a book under one arm and Pat under the other, she betook herself to the window-seat in the upstairs hall, and would not be lured from that retreat, charmed we never so wisely.  She stroked the purring Paddy, and read steadily on, with maddening indifference to all our pleadings.