"Oh! Oh! Oh! What in the world is that?"
This was a chorus of several Ladies' Aid voices,—a double quartette at the very least. Lark gave a sharp exclamation and began looking hurriedly about her on the floor.
"It's got in here,—just as I expected," she exclaimed. "I said you would be sorry, Prue,—Oh, there it is under your chair, Mrs. Prentiss. Just wait,—maybe I can shove it back in the box again."
This was greeted with a fresh chorus of shrieks. There was a hurried and absolute vacation of that corner of the front room. The Ladies fled, dropping their cherished sewing, shoving one another in a most Unladies-Aid-like way.
And there, beneath a chair, squatted the cause of the confusion, an innocent, unhappy, blinking toad!
"Oh, Larkie!"
This was a prolonged wail.
"It's all right, Prue, honestly it is," urged Lark with pathetic solemnity. "We didn't do it for a joke. We're keeping him for a good purpose. Connie found him in the garden,—and—Carol said we ought to keep him for Professor Duke,—he asked us to bring him things to cut up in science, you remember. So we just shoved him into this shoe box, and—we thought we'd keep him in the bath-tub until morning. We did it for a good purpose, don't you see we did? Oh, Prudence!"
Prudence was horribly outraged, but even in that critical moment, justice insisted that Lark's arguments were sound. The professor had certainly asked the scholars to bring him "things to cut up." But a toad! A live one!—And the Ladies' Aid! Prudence shivered.
"I am sure you meant well, Larkie," she said in a low voice, striving hard to keep down the bitter resentment in her heart, "I know you did. But you should not have brought that—that thing—into the house. Pick him up at once, and take him out-of-doors and let him go."