CHAPTER 10
THE HOLE IN THE CARPET
Hooray! hooray! hooray!
Mother comes home to-day;
Mother comes home to-day,
Hooray! hooray! hooray!'
Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the
Phoenix shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.
'How beautiful,' it said, 'is filial devotion!'
'She won't be home till past bedtime, though,' said Robert. 'We
might have one more carpet-day.'
He was glad that mother was coming home--quite glad, very glad; but
at the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite
strong feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day
on the carpet.
'I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only
she'd want to know where we got it,' said Anthea. 'And she'd
never, never believe it, the truth. People never do, somehow, if
it's at all interesting.'
'I'll tell you what,' said Robert. 'Suppose we wished the carpet
to take us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in
it--then we could buy her something.'
'Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered
with strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full
of money that wasn't money at all here, only foreign curiosities,
then we couldn't spend it, and people would bother about where we
got it, and we shouldn't know how on earth to get out of it at
all.
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