Elizabeth shut the door firmly upon the glittering temptation and returned to her youngest born, who was weeping large tears of wrath in the middle of the sitting-room floor.
"Come up stairs with mother, Richard; your sleeves are all wet," exhorted his mother, struggling with a sudden temptation. It would have been a relief to her feelings to spank him soundly, and she acknowledged as much to herself.
"Come, dear," she repeated, in a carefully controlled voice. But Richard's fat legs doubled limply under him; he appeared unable to take a single step; whereupon his slender mother masterfully picked him up, despite the mysterious increase in his weight which she had had frequent occasion to notice in the person of an angry child.
It was useless at the present moment to remind her son of oft-repeated prohibitions concerning the gold-fish tank. Elizabeth pondered the question of an appropriate penalty with knit brows, while she washed and dressed him in dry garments to the accompaniment of his doleful sobs.
"Now, Richard, you must stay in your crib till you can be a good boy and mind mother," was the somewhat vague sentence of the maternal court at the conclusion of the necessary rehabilitation, whereupon the infant howled anew as if under acute bodily torture.
As she turned to pick up the wet clothing a cheerful voice called her to the top of the stairs. "Shall I come up, dear? Your kitchen divinity admitted me and told me to walk right in."
"Oh,--Marian; I'll be right down. I've had to dress Dick over again, and everything's in confusion. Go in the sitting-room, please."
Elizabeth wanted time to collect herself before meeting the cool, amused eyes of Marian Stanford, whose ideas on the government of children were so wholly at variance with her own.
"When you are ready to be a good boy, Richard, you may call mother and I will come up and take you out of your crib," was her parting observation to the culprit.
"Oh, Elizabeth, dear; I'm afraid I interrupted a little maternal seance," was Mrs. Stanford's greeting. "No? Well, I'm glad if I haven't. It does vex me so when someone chances to call just as I am having it out with one of the infants."
"Richard got his sleeves wet," explained Richard's mother, with what the other mentally termed "a really funny air of dignity."