“Pshaw! How much have you got, anyway?”
Octave took out a very flat little porte-monnaie and emptied its contents into Fritzy’s dirty, waiting palms. The amount was eleven cents and one bad German coin, which the little boy said he would take “in case it should be good sometime.” Then, for value received, he imparted the information that “Rosetta wrote a letter. She wrote it with her tongue and her fingers, and making up faces the worsest that ever was! An’ when it was done I drove to the post-office in my pony-cart, and mailed it, an’ the postmaster he gave me a stamp, an’ I licked it on.” After which circumstantial evidence Octave concluded that there could be no doubt about the matter.
“Well, then all I have to say is, that first thing we know, Aunt Ruth will come home.”
“Will she?” asked Fritz, eagerly. Then, as a shadow fell across the path, he looked up. “Ginger!” he cried; “there she is now!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
For an instant silence reigned; but it was not in the frank natures of either Octave or Fritz to tremble long before the apparition which had appeared so suddenly in their midst. Fritz flew to the arms outstretched to receive him with a genuineness of joy that was very sweet to Ruth’s heart, and Octave’s momentary hesitation vanished at the first kindly smile from her relative’s lips.
“Dear Aunt Ruth, I am glad to see you, after all,” she said, coming forward as Fritz was deposited upon the ground; and Ruth’s clear gaze rested on the girl with fond surprise. She did not remember to have left Octave so well grown and fair of face; and yet a second’s thought showed that no very great change could have been accomplished during the few weeks of her absence.
Fritz and Octave had been the aunt’s favorites. She had not even attempted to deny that fact to herself; there was something akin to her own outspoken nature in their characters, and it was with the most implicit confidence she believed that, whoever might have been misbehaving while she had been away, it could not be Octave.
Undoubtedly, Fritzy had been in scrapes innumerable; he could not exist without them; but the scrapes of a child “going on nine” are rarely very serious. Her mind naturally fell upon Paula, whom she liked least of all her nieces; and it was with a prejudgment that Paula had been trying something romantic and out of the common that she had returned to The Snuggery to investigate.
Paula, poor Paula! The irreproachable and really lovely girl, whose faults might be disagreeable because they touched so closely upon the faults of others, but who fully intended to be just perfect, and was all the time anxiously investigating her own motives, lest there should be some flaw therein.