Free Magic by the Lake by Edward Eager Page B

the bookshop that evening, he brought newspapers with him, and the newspapers had staring headlines. Some American explorers had discovered the South Pole.
    "Isn't it exciting?" said the children's mother.
    "Oh, that," said Martha.
    "It's all right, I guess," said Jane, "if you like that kind of thing."
    But as soon as they were alone, the four children read the newspaper accounts through carefully. None of the stories made any mention of Carrie, and they didn't say anything about four ghostly children, either.
    "It's not fair," said Jane. "It was our best chance of going down in history, so far. Now I'll have to think of something else."
    "I don't mind for myself," said Martha. "It's Carrie. You'd think the least they could do would be name the continent after her!"
    "Little Cattia," said Mark.
    "Feline Island," said Katharine.
    "New Carrie," said Jane.
    There was a pause. "Oh, well," said Mark. "At least we'll always know we were a part of it."
    "We can feel secretly proud," said Katharine.
    "Virtue is its own reward," said Martha.
    "It would be," said Jane. "As if it weren't dull enough already! It's adding insult to injury." But she cut the newspaper stories out and put them away in her top bureau drawer just the same.
    The reason the four children were alone was that their mother and Mr. Smith were in the upstairs bedroom talking. They talked for a long time, and dinner was late, and after dinner (and dishes) their mother and Mr. Smith kept looking at each other as if they had something on their minds and wanted to be alone with it, and kept asking the four children if they weren't tired and didn't want to go to bed early, until at last the four children saw the point and decided to humor the poor hapless adults, and they
went
to bed. And Jane and Katharine and Martha went to sleep.
    Mark went to sleep for a while, but then he woke up. The reason he woke up was that their mother and Mr. Smith had come downstairs from their bedroom for a midnight snack and were sitting in the living room having it. And the light shone in Mark's • eyes on the sleeping porch, and he could hear every word they said.
    Of course, he knew perfectly well that eavesdropping is wrong, and he probably should have called out and warned them, but by the time he thought of this he'd already heard so much he decided it would be embarrassing. And besides, he wasn't dropping from the eaves; he was lying obediently in his own bed, and if people
would
come talking right by an open window right next to him, he couldn't help that, could he? And besides, it was interesting.
    So he lay low and said nothing. After a while their mother and Mr. Smith put out the living room light and went upstairs. But still Mark lay awake for a long time thinking.
    Right after breakfast next morning, before swimming or anything, he called a conference. And because the sight of the lake might prove too tantalizing, when there was nothing they could do about it till day after tomorrow, he called it on the other side of the cottage, the side next to the pasture with the sheep and the unfriendly rams. Jane and Katharine and Martha sat in a row on the split-rail fence and listened, while Mark perched on a boulder and drew patterns in the earth with a stick, as he talked.
    "The thing is," he said, "this summer may be all very well for us, and a consolation devoutly to be wished, but it's hard on Mr. Smith," (for he could never bring himself to say Uncle Huge, the way Martha did). "He has to run all this and the bookshop, too. He's having to kind of lead a double life."
    "Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said Katharine.
    "Only different," said Jane.
    "And the thing is," said Mark, "it's beginning to Tell on him. His Business is Suffering. And he's worried about it. I heard him tell Mother so."
    "He looks tired, too," said Martha. "All that driving back and forth."
    "And it's all our fault," said Katharine. "We've been enjoying the magic, and wasting its sweetness on our own desert air,