Budge dejectedly traced with his toe one of the figures in the carpet, and seemed buried in thought; suddenly, however, his face brightened, and he looked up shyly and said, with an infinite scale of inflection:—
“I know.”
“I thought you would find out,” said Mrs. Burton, with an encouraging kiss and embrace, which Budge terminated quite abruptly.
“One victory to report to my superior officer, the dear old humbug,” murmured Mrs. Burton, as she turned again to the keyboard. But before the lady could again put herself en rapport with the composer Budge came flying into the room with a radiant face, and the missing top.
“I told you I knew what you’d do,” said he, “an’ I just went and done it. I prayed about it. I went up-stairs into a chamber and shut the door, and knelt down an’ said, ‘Dear Lord, bless everybody, an’ don’t let me be bad, an’ help me to find that top again, an’ don’t let me have to pray for it as long as I had to pray for that baby.’s And then when I came down-stairs there was that top on the register, just where I left it. Say, Aunt Alice, I think brekbux was an awful long while ago. Don’t you have cakes and oranges to give to little boys?”
“Children should never eat between meals,” Mrs. Burton replied. “It spoils their digestion and makes them cross.”
“Then I guess my digestion’s spoilt already,” said Budge, “for I’m awful cross sometimes, an’ you can’t spoil a bad egg;—that’ what Mike says. So I guess I’d better have some cake; I like the kind with raisins an’ citron best.”
“Only this once,” murmured Mrs. Burton to herself, as she led the way to the dining-room closet, partly for the purpose of hiding her own face. “And I won’t tell Harry about it,” she continued, with greater energy. “Here’s a little piece for Toddie, too,” said Mrs. Burton, “and I want you both to remember that I don’t want you to come indoors until you’re called.”
Budge disappeared, and his aunt had an hour so peaceful that she began to react against it and started to call her nephews into the house. Budge came in hot haste in answer to her call, and volunteered the information that the Burton chicken-coop was much nicer than the one at his own house, for the latter was without means of ingress for small boys. Toddy, however, came with evident reluctance, and stopped en route to sit on the grass and gyrate thereon in a very constrained manner.
“What’s the matter, Toddie?” asked Mrs. Burton, who speedily discerned that the young man was ill at ease.