"Yes, mamma."
Ah! Annie, how easy it is to make a promise! A hearty kiss sealed it; then Mrs. Roby drove away in her carriage, and so our story begins.
Mamma gone out to spend the day, Annie left at home to take care of Dorrie, while nurse was cleaning the nurseries. Annie was six, Ralph, her brother, seven, Dorrie four, and the "funniest little puppet in all England," so Ralph said.
"Annie, I do fink Mab could walk almost by herself with these boots on," said Dorrie, she and Annie back in the dining-room, Dorrie busy with a family of three dolls, Annie deep in a new story-book.
The wee mamma had just contrived to put a pair of new boots, of Annie's manufacturing, on the by no means elegant feet of shock-headed Mab. Next came the suggestion from silver-tongued Dorrie, as Annie was silent—
"I fink Mab and Alice ought to go for a walk. Baby is just gone to sleep;" and the mite was laid carefully among the sofa cushions.
"Very well." Down went the book; with that promise just spoken, Annie could not well do other than go this walk with her little sister, yet in a listless, half-hearted way.
"You take the one hand, I the other;" so prattled Dorrie. "Oh! see her feet!" and certainly Miss Mab did trip it out right nimbly down to the gate. How Dorrie laughed, watching her.
Just outside the gate they met Ralph.