Mrs. Brummagen helped them on with their things, talking all the time, in her broken English, and telling them how she ought not have gone at all, and how she hardly knew what she was doing, and how she couldn’t get away sooner, and how she had worried all day about their getting something to eat.
“Never mind,” said Cricket. “We enjoyed it ever so much. Good-bye, Mosina. Bring her up on Saturday, when you come for the bundle, won’t you? Good-bye.”
It was getting well into the dusk of the short winter day, when the children arrived at home. Cricket flew into her mother’s arms and kissed her as if she had been gone six weeks.
“My little girl, where have you been, and what have you been doing? I was just sending Eliza down for you. Somebody left word at the basement door that you were going to stay at Mrs. Brummagen’s all day, but I expected you home long ago.”
“Mamma, we’ve been playing poor, and I don’t—like—it—one—bit,” said Cricket, slowly, with her head on her mother’s neck. “I always thought it would be rather fun to be poor, but it isn’t. It’s just perfectly horrid. And I’m so hungry, you can’t think! And oh, mamma dearest! suppose—just suppose—that I’d been Mrs. Brummagen’s little girl, instead of yours!”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE DIAMOND RING.
The short days of the girls’ visit flew by on wings.
“Only till to-morrow!” sighed Cricket, as they got up from the luncheon table. “This time to-morrow you’ll be gone, and we’ll be left forlorn! I wish people who come here to visit would stay for always, and never go away.”
“What an India-rubber house you’d have to have,” said Archie, sweeping all her curls over her face with a nourish of his arm, as he passed her.
“Archie, when you get to heaven, you won’t be happy unless you can muss my hair up,” said Cricket, resignedly, shaking it back.