“Shall we tell your mother?” asked Edna when Ben had gone, promising that he would attend to the puzzle the very first thing.
“Why—” Nettie hesitated, “I’d like to have her know and yet I would love dearly to have it for a surprise if we did win. When do you suppose we will know?”
“Not before next Friday, I suppose, but that will be soon enough, won’t it?”
“Yes, except that I can scarcely wait to know, and it is hard to keep a secret from your mother that long.”
“Why don’t you tell her that you have a secret and that you can’t tell her till Friday?”
“I might do that, but then suppose I shouldn’t win; we would both be disappointed.”
“What did you tell her just now that we were all doing?”
“I told her we were doing a puzzle, and she said as long as I had done my morning’s work I could stay with you. I have still my stockings to darn, but I can do those this afternoon. Mother always lets me do them when I choose; so long as I get them done before Sunday, that is all she asks.”
Edna looked very sympathetic. She did not have to do her stockings nowadays, though she remembered that it had been one of the week’s tasks when she was staying with Aunt Elizabeth, and it was one she much disliked. She stayed a little while longer and then returned home, for Dorothy was coming that afternoon and they were both going over to see Margaret to make what Dorothy said was their party call.
The weather was quite mild; already the buds were beginning to swell on the trees, and the crocuses were starting up in the little grass plot in front of Nettie’s home. Edna stopped to look at them as she passed out. She was full of Nettie’s secret but she had promised not to tell. She wished Cousin Ben would come back so she could talk it over with him, but he was not to return till late in the day and meantime she must occupy herself and not say a word of what was uppermost in her mind.