damp in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and
damp in the face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over
the dirty one that she had dished up those dear delightful chickens
in. She stood there and she seemed to get redder and damper, and
she twisted the corner of her apron round her fingers, and she said
very shortly and fiercely--

'If you please ma'am, I should wish to leave at my day month.'
Mother leaned against the hatstand. The children could see her
looking pale through the crack of the door, because she had been
very kind to the cook, and had given her a holiday only the day
before, and it seemed so very unkind of the cook to want to go like
this, and on a Sunday too.

'Why, what's the matter?' mother said.

'It's them children,' the cook replied, and somehow the children
all felt that they had known it from the first. They did not
remember having done anything extra wrong, but it is so frightfully
easy to displease a cook. 'It's them children: there's that there
new carpet in their room, covered thick with mud, both sides,
beastly yellow mud, and sakes alive knows where they got it. And
all that muck to clean up on a Sunday! It's not my place, and it's
not my intentions, so I don't deceive you, ma'am, and but for them
limbs, which they is if ever there was, it's not a bad place,
though I says it, and I wouldn't wish to leave, but--'

'I'm very sorry,' said mother, gently. 'I will speak to the
children. And you had better think it over, and if you REALLY wish
to go, tell me to-morrow.'