Chapter 25

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Chap 25.
Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves.

Matthew was having a bad ten minutes of it. He had come into the kitchen, in the twilight of a cold, gray December evening and had sat down in the wood-box corner to take off his heavy boots, unconscious of the fact that Anne and a bevy of her school-mates were having a practice of The Fairy Queen in the sitting-room. Presently they came trooping through the hall and out into the kitchen, laughing and chattering gaily. They did not see Matthew, who shrank bashfully back into the shadows beyond the wood-box with a boot in one hand and a boot-jack in the other, and he watched them shyly for the aforesaid ten minutes as they put on caps and jackets and talked about the dialogue and the concert