“No, my boy. I have a ten days’ holiday and we are going to spend it here, all together,” answered his father.
Jane burst into tears.
“Now, Jane!” whispered Christopher fiercely, and reached out a hand to clutch Jane’s skirts.
But she was too quick for him and sprang to the shelter of her mother’s arms.
“Oh, we needn’t have done it! We needn’t have done it!” she wailed.
Everybody was unspeakably astonished except Christopher, who grew very red in the dusk, squirmed about on his chair, finally rose and muttering something about “girls being such softies,” ran into the house.
“Oh, mother,” sobbed Jane, “come over here.”
She drew her mother apart and made her sit down. Then standing beside her, the dear mother-shoulder ready to hide a shamed face, she whispered her story:
“Kit and I thought you and father were going to take us right back home to the city, and we didn’t want to go, and Kit said if one of us was ill or something, that we couldn’t go so soon, so he—he made me promise and we—I ate a lot of mushy bread and milk and drank some warm water and Kit whirled me till I was dizzy and—and grandmother put me to bed; then Kit came up and painted my face out of our water-color box and whirled me again and grandmother thought it was measles. She was scared and she cried because she had to give up her trip to the city with grandfather to meet you and mother—oh, mother, I’m so mis’rable! And I have broken my promise to Kit, too, ’cause I promised him not to tell!”
The halting, sobbing whisper ceased and Jane, in an agony of weeping, buried her head in her mother’s breast.