“Half a bushel.”
The twins looked at each other in delight.
“We’ll take ’em,” they cried together, and Christopher drew the thirty cents—two ten and two five cent pieces—from his trousers pocket.
They were very proud and excited all the way home. They hardly glanced at the circus posters, so eager were they to reach Sunnycrest and complete their sacrifice, and they kept urging Joshua to drive faster. They took turns sitting on the basket of fruit, they were so afraid that an apple might jostle out and be lost.
Grandfather, grandmother and Mrs. Hartwell-Jones were all sitting on the veranda. Mrs. Hartwell-Jones was able to limp downstairs once a day, by the aid of one of grandfather’s canes. Jane and Christopher carried the basket between them, up to the top of the steps. Christopher felt suddenly sheepish and hung his head, but Jane, brave in the consciousness of having done right, spoke up boldly:
“Grandfather, Huldah said we must have eaten ’most half a bushel of apples yesterday, and she couldn’t make so many apple pies as she could if we hadn’t eaten them, and we thought we ought to be punished for taking the apples without leave, didn’t we, Kit, and we didn’t want to be kept home from the circus, so we went to town with Josh and buyed—I mean bought, these to make up.”
“And it took all of both our ’lowances,” added Christopher virtuously.
How the grown-ups laughed! But there were tears in grandmother’s eyes as she thanked the twins and called Huldah to come and take the basket.
Later in the day, grandmother called Jane and Christopher into her own room and gave them each fifteen cents.
“I want you to understand that I am not doing it because I think you did not deserve the punishment of losing it,” she said seriously, “for it was wrong to have eaten the apples, both because it endangered your health to eat unripe fruit and because it is always a sin to take what does not belong to one without asking. But I wish to reward, and so encourage, the spirit you have both shown today of desiring to make atonement for wrong. God bless you, my dears.”