The boy swallowed painfully.
“Tell me, Ernest, I won’t tell. Honest to goodness, I won’t.” Jane cuddled up close to him laying her face against his shoulder caressingly.
Ernest was not proof against her sympathy and he blurted out his remorse.
“’Tisn’t your fault a speck—you didn’t tease her to come.”
Chicken Little patted and argued in vain. Ernest found her comforting, but did not feel that she was old enough to understand.
Chicken Little took the matter up with Marian the very next day. She began very diplomatically because she had promised not to tell.
“Do you s’pose you’d got sick if you hadn’t come to see Ernest that day, Marian?”
“Probably not, dear.”
This was not reassuring.
“But you might have gone some place else, mightn’t you?”