“How dare you!  How dare you!  You wicked, disobedient, daring girl, setting the place on fire and risking our lives, and wasting candles, and—­and you know I do not allow reading in bed.”

“I wasn’t reading,” stammered Kitty—­“I mean, not stories.  I was only learning my lessons.  I must learn them somehow, and I can’t—­I really can’t—­learn them downstairs, Aunt Pike, with Anna whistling and hissing all the time; it is no use.  I have tried and tried, and I must know them.  I wasn’t setting the place on fire; it is quite safe.  I had stood the candle-stick in a basin.  I always do.”

“Always do!  Do you mean to say that you are in the habit of reading in bed?”

“Yes,” said Kitty honestly, “we always have.  Father does too.”

“Even after you knew I did not allow it?” cried Aunt Pike, ignoring Kitty’s reference to her father.

“I didn’t know you didn’t allow it,” said Kitty doggedly.  “I had never heard you say anything about it; and as father did it, I didn’t think there was any harm.”

“No harm! no harm to frighten poor Anna so that she flew from her bed and came rushing through the dark house to me quite white and trembling.  She was afraid your room was on fire, and was dreadfully frightened of course.  She will probably feel the ill effects of the shock for some time.”

Betty, having got over her fright, had been sitting up in bed all this time embracing her knees.  When Anna’s name was mentioned her eyes began to sparkle.  “If Anna had come in here first to see, she needn’t have trembled or been frightened,” she remarked shrewdly.

“Anna naturally ran to her mother,” said Mrs. Pike sharply.

“Anna naturally ran to sneak,” said Betty to herself, “and I don’t believe she really thought there was a fire at all, and I’ll tell her so when I get her by herself.”  Aloud she said, “I wonder what made her get out of bed and look under our door.  She couldn’t have smelt fire, for of course there wasn’t any to smell.”

“Be quiet, Elizabeth.—­Remember, Katherine,” her aunt went on, turning to her, “that if ever I hear of or see any behaviour of this kind again, I shall have you to sleep in my room, and put Anna in here with Elizabeth.”  Which was a threat so full of horror to both the girls that they subsided speechless.

“I think,” whispered Betty, as soon as their aunt’s footsteps had ceased to sound—­“no, I don’t think, I know that Anna is the very meanest sneak I ever met.”

“I hope I shall never know a meaner,” groaned Kitty; “but I—­I won’t be beaten by her.  I won’t!  I won’t!”

“And I’ll beat her too,” snapped Betty.

“I am ashamed that she is a relation,” said Kitty in hot disgust.

“She isn’t a real one,” said Betty scornfully, “and for the future I shan’t count her one at all.  We won’t own such a mean thing in the family.”

“I wonder why she is so horrid,” sighed Kitty, who was more distressed by these things than was Betty.  “We never did her any harm.  Perhaps she can’t help it.  It must be awful to be mean, and a sneak, and to feel you can’t help it.”