“How did you fall? On your head?”
“Pooh! What fools girls is! If I’d ’a’ fell on my head, I would ’a’ been hurt, you bet. But I just slid inter that pile o’ mortar the men had mixed ter fix the cistern with. My feet went in clear up to my waist! Nen, when my mother caught hold o’ me, she had a nawful job to pull me out. She got all over dirt herself, too; so she’s got to have her clothes washed too!”
“But the bruises? Where are they?”
Robert struggled to unwind himself from the folds of blanket in which maternal anxiety had enswathed his plump little limbs and displayed those members with a look of triumph.
“Shades of Jacob’s coat—Joseph’s, I mean! There is not an inch of originally colored skin upon you! But see here, young man! Those are not all new bruises; though, if Mr. Dolloway saw them, I don’t wonder he thought you were about killed. Those are the scars of many battles with misfortune, if I’m not much mistaken!”
“Wull, who said they wasn’t? That yeller an’ green patch, that come the time I fell out the cherry-tree, the first day I got here. That—”
“Never mind the enumeration. You are beautifully mottled, sort of like a tortoise-shell cat. And I’ve run away from my work, scared poor Miss Joanna into a fit, and behaved altogether badly, just because you slid off a roof! Now I must take my bit of lunch quickly and get back. And, by the way, Bob, if you’ll promise not to do anything more to plague Motherkin all this day till I get home again, I’ll tell you a secret, a good one.”
The child’s face lighted eagerly, and a rash promise was on his tongue’s end, but he bethought himself of the chrysanthemum affair and paused in time. “Pooh! I s’pose it’s som’thin’ to get me inter another scrape. Nen—”
“Don’t be so wise, my dear. I am going to tell my mother the first. But I thought it would please you to know, too, and you could be making happy plans while you were obliged to lie here. Heigho! There comes Roland and somebody in a phaeton! The doctor, I suppose. Now, my sweet, you’re in for it! I hope it will be a lesson to you!”
“Oh, Bon, don’t go away! You wouldn’t leave a feller in a trouble, would you? An’ if he should, mebbe he will, find I was smashed up inside somewhere, how bad you’d feel about fersakin’ your poor little brother, wouldn’t you? I—I wish you’d stay, Bon!”