‘This is what we will do, Sally. To-night we will tell Father all about it and whatever he says we will do. Now run over to Aunt Bee’s with this card of buttons. She left them here yesterday. And don’t stay too long, Sally. Come home soon.’
What would Father say to-night? Was she to buy her present now or to wait four long, long weeks? Sally could think and talk of nothing else.
‘If I am very good all day long, don’t you think Father will say, “Buy your present now?”’ Sally asked Aunt Bee, and Aunt Bee thought it likely that he would.
Then Sally went over to visit Alice, and she and Alice talked and talked about the present that might be bought the very next day.
‘A tea-set,’ said Alice at once. ‘I don’t think there is anything nicer than a tea-set. And do try to choose one with pink flowers. Pink flowers are the prettiest of all.’
Sally did want a tea-set, but, oh! think of a doll’s piano!
‘A trunk would be nice for the dolls,’ suggested Sally, ‘only I haven’t many clothes to put in it, and I would like a rolling-pin and a wash-tub and some teeny, tiny clothes-pins, too. I wish it was night, don’t you, Alice? Don’t you wish Father was home now?’
But, to-night, of all nights in the year, Father didn’t come home to dinner at all. He telephoned Mother that he would not be home until long past Sally’s bedtime. So Sally was forced to go to bed without knowing what Father’s answer would be.
But the next morning she woke to find Mother standing at her bedside, and before Sally could ask a single question she knew by Mother’s smiling face that she was to buy her present now.
‘Yes, we are to go into the city to-day,’ said Mother, ‘to buy your birthday present.’