Three Bright Girls: A Story of Chance and Mischance

HOT CHESTNUTS.

Pop!

"There's one!" cries an excited voice.

Pop! bang!

"There's another! look, two! and both on my side," exclaims an equally eager though older voice.

"Here, Doris, you just sheer off to your own side and pick up your own, if you've got the pluck to risk burning those white fingers of yours;" and casting contemptuous glances at the hands in question, the speaker, a bright, handsome boy of about thirteen, dives down upon the rug and commences making sundry ineffectual snatches at several chestnuts which are lying smoking and gleaming amongst the cinders.

"Not so fast, good sir," cries the owner of the white hands, following her brother's example and, despite her seventeen years, prostrating herself beside him. "White or black, I bet you twopence I pick them up quicker than you. Here, Molly, hold the plate. Now, Dick, start fair, you know. Oh! there's another!" And thereupon commences a hot skirmish, in every sense, over the nuts, which by this time are besprinkling the hearth pretty freely: so hot and energetic, in fact, that the other occupants of the room wisely retire from the contest, contenting themselves with looking on, and exploding with laughter now and again at the suppressed exclamations indicative of the warm nature of the undertaking.

A breathless silence for at least two minutes, then, flushed with victory, Doris rises from the floor and is about to lay her plate on the table, when, lo! another loud pop. Whereupon Dick rushes over with great violence to the spot where his sister is standing, and knocking against her in his efforts to reach the prize first, Doris loses her balance, and clutching wildly at the back of a chair which Daisy is sitting on and tilting back comfortably, down come Daisy, chair, Doris, and nuts, all in an indiscriminate heap on the floor. Loud exclamations arise on all sides, and a pitiful howl is wrung from Daisy, who has planted her hand, in falling, on an almost red-hot chestnut. Doris does not attempt to get up, but, still sitting where she has arrived in such summary fashion, she rates Dick soundly for his ungallant behaviour, her voice subsiding into a sort of wail as she concludes with the remark, "And now I suppose I shall have to do my hair again, you wretched boy. I can't appear before every one like this. Look here!" and giving her head a shake forward, down comes the pretty erection of golden curls which half an hour ago had crowned so becomingly the small neat head.

"Bless me!" exclaims the incorrigible boy, "I quite forgot my lady is to grace the festive board downstairs to-night. But don't you tell me, Miss Doris, that you wouldn't have done your hair again anyhow! I know what a time girls take dressing, and my name is not Dick Merivale if you don't spend a good hour this evening pranking and prinking before the glass."

"Help me up, Dick, and don't talk so much," says Doris, quietly ignoring this tirade; "and now, if you have quite finished and will be kind enough to let Honor speak, I shall be glad. To my certain knowledge she has been trying to make herself heard for the last five minutes."

The noise having now subsided, a clear, gentle voice is heard from the neighbourhood of the fireplace, where Honor is kneeling beside the afflicted Daisy and examining the small burn caused by the hot chestnut.

"I was only saying, Doris, that if Lane is too busy with mother to help you I will turn lady's-maid and do your hair and dress you. Molly, do put down that poker."

"You're a dear!" exclaims impetuous Doris throwing her arms round Honor's neck. "I would ever so much rather you helped me than Lane. She's so prim and fussy. Where is Lucy, though?--mother will not want them both."

"O, I meant to tell you. Her sister is worse again, so mother let her go home to see her. Now let us have these chestnuts if we're going to. Pull your chairs up to the fire again and let us be cosy. Good gracious, what an untidy rug you've made! What would Miss Denison say if she saw it? Dick, my boy, you will have to mend your manners before she returns, or she will be looking every hour of the day in that quiet way of hers which speaks such volumes. Really I am glad she is coming back to-morrow, for I have had about enough of keeping order, or trying to, since she left."

"Why didn't she appoint me commander-in-chief?" says Doris, pouting over the skinning of a still-hot nut. "I am the eldest, though no one ever seems to think so."

"Because you are such a scatter-brained piece of goods," puts in her polite brother. "No one with a grain of sense would ever credit your being the elder by twelve, nay, thirteen months. Why, Honor looks a hundred compared to you!"

"Thanks, Dick. You are monstrously polite this afternoon," said Honor quietly. "In what consists my antiquity, pray?--has my hair turned white? or have I lost all my front teeth?"

"O, I meant nothing about your appearance," replies the boy, looking rather sheepish; "I mean as to sense and cleverness and--and all that sort of thing, you know. Of course Doris is considered the beauty of the family, with her light fluffy hair and her great blue eyes, but to my thinking old Honor is every bit as good-looking. What say you, Molly?"

"She's a dear old Honor, that's what she is," says Molly, looking up and patting her elder sister's hand affectionately. To be sure the effect of this statement is somewhat marred by the fact of the speaker's mouth being full of chestnuts. The sentiment is the same, however, and Dick, banging his hand down on the table, cries triumphantly, "There you are, you see--_old_ again! Now what have you got to say, Miss Honor?"

"That you are a goose and that Molly is another, for if she will persist in tilting her chair like that she will follow Daisy's example and come to the ground."

Molly brings her chair on to its fore-legs with a bang, then proceeds to announce solemnly, "We don't seem to be getting a bit nearer to settling these theatricals. Here's Miss Denison coming back to-morrow expecting us to have arranged everything and to have been rehearsing our parts, and--"

"_Parts!_" echoes Dick; "how can you call it a part when you have nothing to do but to sit or stand still?"

"Well, it is a part all the same," cries Molly, not to be put down. "Each one is a part of the whole picture, I suppose; so if you can't allow it in one sense you can in another."

"Hum, especially when there is only one person in the picture!" mutters Dick. But here Honor's voice is heard saying, "Well, children, no disputing or we shall never settle anything. Now, who has got the list of the subjects that we made out last night?"

"Here it is," says Doris, who has had it spread out on her knees studying for some time. "Now, first of all, is it quite settled that we are only to have nursery rhymes; or do you think people will think it silly?"

"We might have one or two historical scenes, perhaps," says Honor reflectively.

"Or one or two Shakespearian or Tennysonian," suggests Dick, who has rather high-flown ideas. "Let us do the 'play scene' in Hamlet. I'll be Hamlet, and--I--suppose Doris would have to be Ophelia."

"How absurd you are, Dick!" exclaims that damsel satirically. "Where would you get all the people from? Do for goodness' sake bring the picture before your mind's eye for a moment. Why, besides Hamlet and Ophelia there are the king and queen, all their ladies and gentlemen, and then all the players. Why, we couldn't do it, not with all the boys next door even; and just think what a bother the scene would be to arrange. We should want a double stage, and all sorts of regal appendages which I am sure we could not find anywhere. You Hamlet, too!" she finishes up with scorn.

"All right! Don't excite yourself," says Dick calmly.

"I think," says Honor, "we shall be wiser to keep to the nursery rhymes, because we can take any amount of license with them, and use our own discretion about the dressing of them. But if we take a scene that everybody knows we must be careful to have everything perfectly correct; and though I should be sorry to underrate the talent of such celebrities in the art of acting as ourselves, I don't think we are up to it. Now, Doris, read your list."

"Mother Hubbard," reads Doris; "verse where she looks in the cupboard. Vic will do the dog capitally. Molly will coach her up in her part and--"

"There, you hear!" exclaims that young lady. "Doris calls them parts too, and so they are, of course!" and looking at her brother defiantly she attacks the chestnuts with renewed ardour.

"What shall we do for the cupboard?" inquires Daisy with wide-open eyes.

"We can get Mrs. Mason to let us have one of her portable safes up, and if there are a few plates and dishes left inside, with anything in the eatable way on them, Vic is sure to sit up and beg."

"Well, that one will do," says Molly, getting up and hanging over her sister's shoulder; "but read on, Doris. Look! the time is going on awfully fast; in another hour you'll have to dress."

So Doris reads the list, which gives general satisfaction. Then laying it down, she says, "If only father helps us, we shall do. He only wants a little petting and coaxing, and I am sure he will. Hark! that's the carriage now, isn't it? Run and look, Dick; is it father?"

"Yes, and it's snowing like anything. I declare he has got quite white while standing a minute to speak to Rawlings. We must give him time to get off his coat and speak to mother, and then we'll fetch him up here, and not let him go until he promises all we want."

"Hey! what's that I hear?" cries a cheery voice at the door. "Come now, that is what one might call a very moderate request, ladies and gentlemen. Why, where is Bobby? Oh, gone to tea next door; a common occurrence, eh? Now, come and kiss me, girls. Bless my heart, one at a time, one at a time; there are plenty of kisses for all. And here's mother, looking jealous, I declare!"

"I shouldn't wonder," says Mrs. Merivale, who, almost unobserved in the midst of all the tumult, has quietly entered the room behind her husband. "Enough to make anyone jealous, I should think. Honor, dear," her tone changing to one of anxiety, "I hope you haven't been letting Daisy eat many of those nasty indigestible nuts."

"O, no, mother!" replies Daisy herself promptly, "I wanted heaps more, but Honor said 'No.'"