“I’d be charmed to, and I’ll bring my old doll, Seraphina. She is huge and hasn’t any nose left and only one eye. Will she be welcome in this wounded state or had we better put her in a hospital?”
“Oh, Marian, will you?—I’d love to see her.”
“She’s down in the bottom of a trunk, but I am sure she would be delighted to get out in the world again. What are you looking at with those big eyes of yours, Katy?”
“I was just thinking she must be awful old.”
“She is—frightfully—almost as old as I am. My aunt brought her to me from Paris when I was just seven. She was elegant then—all pink silk ruffles with a little wreath of forget-me-nots in her hair. I crowed over all the children I knew because she was so fine, but I must be getting home. Children dear, I wonder if your mothers would mind if you ran down to the postoffice to mail this letter for me. I want it to get off on the five o’clock train.”
Chicken Little’s boasted luck seemed about to fail her entirely on her birthday morning. She got up late and was so excited over her little remembrances that she almost forgot to get ready for school. She ran as hard as she could, so hard she had a stitch in her side, but the last child in the line was disappearing inside the school-house door, when she was still half a block away.
She knew what that meant. Miss Brown had a harsh rule for tardy pupils—they stayed one-half hour after school, rain or shine. And to stay in a half hour on one’s birthday with a party on foot was unthinkable. Why it would be most dark when she got home! And her mother—well, maybe her mother wouldn’t say very much since it was her birthday, but Jane wasn’t keen about hearing what she would say.
She dragged herself reluctantly up the stairs, taking an unnecessarily long time to hang up her wraps and it was fully five minutes past nine when she took her seat. Miss Brown looked severe.
“You understand this means thirty minutes after school. I have told you I will not tolerate tardiness.”
Chicken Little didn’t try to catch up with Katy and Gertie going home that noon. She plodded along soberly by herself with such a forlorn air that Dick Harding, just behind her on his way to his own lunch, was struck by it, and overtook her to find out what was amiss now.