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Janet stood in the doorway and laughed, then she made a dive for her brother, but instead of trying to use strength she tickled him. "Here, stop; that's no fair," he protested, but Janet only renewed her efforts, and Phyllis, taking advantage of his helplessness, jumped up. After that it was only a matter of seconds before Tommy was on the sofa completely muffled by cushions.
He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say "hand me the silver sugar tongs;" and, before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of "the urn" for a tea kettle; or by calling a homely bench a sofa.
He made up his mind to eat less, but unfortunately it was not possible to carry out this brilliant idea when he wakened each morning with an amazing appetite and the table near his sofa was set with a breakfast of home-made bread and fresh butter, snow-white eggs, raspberry jam and clotted cream.
"With me," he went on, "you will be as safe as safe" and even in his ardor he hesitated a moment for a comparison "as safe," he said, with a kind of simple solemnity, "as in your father's arms." Still she looked at him and her tears increased. Then, abruptly, she buried her face on the cushioned arm of the sofa beside her chair, and broke into noiseless sobs.
At first she was half afraid of him; then she liked him; then he was "so good to me!" and then she pitied him! for he told her, sitting on that hard old sofa, in the June twilight, how he had no mother, how he had been cast upon the charities of a cruel and evil world from his infancy; reminded her of the old red school-house where they had been to school together, and the tyranny of the big boys over him, a little curly, motherless boy.
He found her in the library with his grandfather evidently awaiting his coming. They were seated together upon a sofa. "Dearest mother," Edward said, dropping upon his knees by her side and clasping her in his arms, "how can I ever thank you enough for your kindness this day to me and my darling!
The fat girl, seizing the chance afforded her, remarked genteelly that she too had "heard hof me," with emphasis upon the "hof." She also remarked it was a long walk from Blackfriars Bridge. "All depends upon the company, eh? Bet they didn't find it too long." This came from a loud-voiced, red-faced man sitting on the sofa beside a somewhat melancholy-looking female dressed in bright green.
At four o'clock we lunched on bread and goat's-milk cheese, as we sat on the sofa; and when we rose, I do not know why, but my father did not wish me to brush off the back, which the little mason had spotted with white, from his jacket: he restrained my hand, and then rubbed it off himself on the sly.
I felt confidence in myself, my eyes were opened all at once as it were to the heartlessness of the world; the more I considered the almost hopeless condition in which I was in, the more my energy was roused. I sat down on the sofa a confiding, clinging girl. I rose up a resolute, clear-sighted woman.
She had been almost fluttered for a few minutes, and still remained so sensibly animated as to put away her work, move Pug from her side, and give all her attention and all the rest of her sofa to her husband.
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