For a full minute Mary Jane stared at the wreck that had been her doll.
Then she turned and ran screaming toward the house.
Mrs. Merrill heard her and met her at the front steps.
"Mary Jane! Dear child!" she cried, "what is the matter? Tell mother what has happened!"
"My doll! My beautifulest doll!" sobbed Mary Jane, "my Marie Georgianna is all run over!"
"Surely not, surely not, Mary Jane," said her mother as she picked up the little girl and sat down, with her on her lap, on the porch steps, "dolls don't get run over."
"My doll did," said Mary Jane positively, "see?"
Mrs. Merrill looked out into the street and there, sure enough, was the wreck of the doll.
"Tell me how it happened, dear," said Mrs. Merrill and she gathered her little girl tighter in her arms as she spoke for she knew that if a doll had been run over, Mary Jane herself had not missed an accident by so very much for the doll and the little girl were always close together.
Mary Jane wiped her eyes on her mother's handkerchief, snugged cozily in the comfortable arms and told her story.
"I was going over to play with Junior like you said I could," she began (Junior was the little neighbor boy who lived across the street in the big white house), "and just as I got into the middle of the street I heard a big, big noisy 'toot-t-t-t-t' way down by Fifth Street—and you know, mother" (and here Mary Jane sat up straight) "that you always told me if an automobile was as far away as Fifth Street it was all right—so I went on across. But this automobile didn't just come; it hurried fast, oh, so very fast and by the time I was half way across the road it was so close I just turned around and ran back to the curbstone and I was in such a hurry I guess I must have dropped my Marie Georgianna!"