“He is one tough little kid,” admitted Neale O’Neil, in an undertone.
“What about the little Newman boy?” asked Ruth indulgently. “And then we must all study.”
“Why,” said Dot, big-eyed and very much in earnest, “you know Robbie Newman doesn’t go to school yet; and he’s an awful trial to his mother.”
“That is gossip, Dot,” Tess interposed severely.
But the smallest Corner House girl was not to be derailed from the main line of her story, and went right on:
“He was naughty the other day and his mamma told him she’d shut him up somewhere all by himself. ‘If you do, Mamma,’ he said, ‘I’ll just smash ev’rything in the room.’”
“Oh-oo!” gasped Tess, proving herself to be quite as much interested in the “gossip” as the others around the evening lamp. “What a wicked boy!”
“But he didn’t smash anything,” Dot was quick to explain. “For his mother put him right out in the henhouse.”
“The henhouse! Fancy!” said Agnes.
“There wasn’t anything for him to smash there,” said Dot. “But when she had locked him in, Robbie put his head out of the little door where the hens go in and out, and he called after her: