"It's a welly anxietious thing, yoasting chestnuts is," Rupert said, shaking his head seriously.

Rupert is only four years old, but he is very fond of grand words. He speaks quite plainly and nicely, Nurse says (excepting the v's and r's), only, of course, he cannot remember always just the shape of the big words; but he uses much grander ones than I do, though I am nearly six.

But he is the nicest little boy in all the world, and we do love each other better than anybody else at all, after Mother and Father.

We made what Rupert calls an "arranglement" about always being friends with each other; that was the night we roasted the chestnuts.

It was one of the most interesting things we had ever done—and then to be allowed to do it alone! You see, this was the way.

It was the dreadfullest day we can remember in all our lives.

Because you know, first of all, Mother was so ill. And then there was a birthday party we were to have gone to.

And Sarah, who is the housemaid, said she didn't see why we couldn't go just the same, and Nurse said very sharply:

"I'm not going to let them go, I can tell you, with things as they are."

And then she said, in another kind of voice:

"Just suppose they had to be sent for to go in to the mistress——"

And then she went away again into Mother's dressing-room.

That was another horrid thing, that nobody seemed to be able to look after us at all; we could have got into all sorts of mischief if we had wanted, but everything was so dreadful that it made us not want.

There were two doctors, who went and came several times, and someone they called Nurse, but she wasn't our Nurse.

And our Nurse could not be in the nursery with us, but kept shutting herself up in Mother's dressing-room, and that made us be getting into everybody's way.

So at last, when evening came, Nurse sent us down to the drawing-room, because somebody had let the nursery fire go almost out, and she told us to stay there and be good, and Father said he would perhaps come and sit with us by-and-by.

But I don't know what we should have done there so long if Sarah had not brought us a plate of chestnuts, and shown us how to roast them.

(We feel sure that Nurse would not have allowed it by ourselves, and would have called it "playing with fire," but Father looked in at us once, and did not stop us at all, but only said we were very good, and Cook and Sarah kept looking in too, and they were very kind, only rather quiet and queer.)

So that was how it was that we came to be allowed to be roasting chestnuts in the drawing-room by ourselves, which does seem a little funny, if you did not know about that dreadful day.

"There's only two left now," Rupert said.

We hadn't eaten all the plateful, of course, because so many of them, when they popped, had popped quite into the fire, and we were not to try to get them out.

We had roasted one each for Sarah, and for Cook, and for Nurse, and for Father, and of course the biggest of all for Mother.