"What are you crying for, Daisy?" asked Nellie. "Frankie, do you know what is the matter with her?"
"He told me he'd marry me if I let him mix the pies," sobbed the distressed Daisy; "and now he won't."
"Now, Daisy, you ought to be ashamed to say that," cried Frankie, stopping short with a pie in each hand, and looking with a much aggrieved air at his little playmate. "Yes, I did promise to marry her if she'd let me make the pies," he continued, turning to Nellie, "and so I will; but I promised three other girls before her, and so I told her she'd have to wait till they were all dead, and she wouldn't have patience, but just went and cried about it. I can't help it if so many girls want to marry me," added the young sultan, tenderly laying his sand pies in the wagon.
Daisy had ceased her cries to listen to Frankie's statement of the case; but her spirits were so depressed at once more hearing this indefinite postponement of her matrimonial prospects that she broke forth into a fresh wail of despair.
"Oh, Daisy!" said Nellie, "what shall we do with you: you're growing to be a real cry-baby."
"Yes," said Master Frankie, seeing his way at once to a peaceful solution of his difficulties. "And I shall never, never marry a cry-baby. You'd better hurry up and be good, Daisy."
At this terrible threat, Daisy's shrieks subsided into broken sobs; and Frankie, touched by the extreme desolation of her whole aspect, farther consoled her, by telling her if she would dry her eyes and be good, he would let her "make two mixes, and marry her besides." At which condescension on the part of her chosen lord and master, Daisy was in another instant beaming with smiles, and thrusting her dimpled hands into the wet sand; and the older children left her and Frankie to their play.
All but Bessie, that is, who lingered behind to give her brother a little moral lecture.
For Bessie's sense of justice had been shocked by Frankie's arrangements, and the hard bargain he had driven with the devoted Daisy, who upon all occasions submitted herself to his whims, and let him rule her with a rod of iron. Moreover, Bessie considered his gallantry very much at fault, and thought it quite necessary to speak her mind on the subject.
"Frankie," she said with gravity, "you are selfish to Daisy, I think. You ought to let her make half the pies."