"Well, wish it! I dare you to wish it!" cried Panoria, while Eliza looked on horrified at her little friend's suggestion.
By this time Saveria had led the children from the grotto, and, walking on ahead, was returning toward their home. She did not hear Panoria's "dare."
"You may dare me," Napoleon replied to the challenge of Panoria; "but if I do not wish it, you gain nothing by daring me."
"Ho! you are afraid, little boy!" cried Panoria.
"I afraid?" and Napoleon turned his piercing glance upon the little girl, so that she quailed before it.
But Panoria was an obstinate child, and she returned to the charge.
"But if you did wish it, would you do it, Napoleon?" she asked. "Of course," the boy replied.
"Oh, it is easy to brag," said Panoria; "but when your great man, your uncle the canon, is around, you are no braver, I'll be bound, than little Pauline, or even Eliza here."
By this time Eliza, too, had grown brave; and she said stoutly to her friend, "What! I am not brave, you say? You shall see."
Then as Saveria, turning, bade them hurry on, Eliza caught Panoria's hand, and ran toward the nurse; but as she did so, she said to Panoria, boastingly and rashly,--
"Come into our house! If I do not eat some of those very pears out of that very basket of our uncle the canon's, then you may call me a coward, Panoria!"
"Would you then dare?" cried Panoria. "I'll not believe it unless I see you."
Eliza was "in for it" now. "Then you shall see me!" she declared. "Come to my house. Mamma Letitia is away visiting, and I shall have the best chance. I promise you; you shall see."
"Hurry, then," said Panoria. "It is better than braving the black elves, this that you are to do, Eliza. For truly I think your uncle the canon must be an ogre."
"You shall see," Eliza declared again; and, running after Nurse Saveria, they were soon in the narrow street in which, standing across the way from a little park, was the big, bare, yellowish-gray, four-story house in which lived the Bonaparte family, always hard pushed for money, and having but few of the fine things which so large a house seemed to call for. Indeed, they would have had scarcely anything to live on had it not been for this same important relative, "our uncle, the Canon Lucien," who spent much of his yearly salary of fifteen hundred dollars upon this family of his nephew, "Papa Charles," one of whom was now about to make a raid upon his picked and particular pears.