“Promised your mother I wouldn’t tell a soul. You won’t have to wait long, dear, so be a good child and don’t tease. Here’s a cooky for you.”
Alice patted the rough brown head lovingly.
During the next week excitement lurked around every corner in the Morton home. Mrs. Morton was having a wonderful ashes-of-roses silk dress made. Chicken Little found Alice concocting a huge fruit cake with a perfect marvel of white frosting, and this was promptly stowed away in the big tin cake box and labelled “Hands Off.” Not so much as a bite was permitted to any member of the family.
Jane came into the room unnoticed one day in time to hear her mother say to Frank: “Of course, the house is from both of us, but I want to give you something all by myself, and I think I will make it a silver water set.”
This was too much for Chicken Little. Why should her father be giving brother Frank a house? Wasn’t he going to live with them any more? She decided to go and talk the mystery over with Katy, but her mother saw her and called her back.
“I’ve something very nice to tell you, little daughter, but we want to keep it a secret for a week or two yet, so you must promise Mother not to tell anybody till Mother gives you permission.”
Chicken Little nodded eagerly.
“Your brother Frank is going to be married, dear, early in November, to lovely Marian Gates—they are going to live near us over on Front Street. Your father has given them that pretty cottage next to Darts’. You have always wanted a sister—now you will have one. Won’t that be nice?”
Chicken Little was too astonished to answer and her mother continued: “I am going to take you over to see Marian tomorrow afternoon and you must be a little lady so brother Frank will be proud of his little sister.”
Chicken Little was so absorbed with the main idea that the hated “little lady” passed unnoticed. When her mother had finished telling her some of the details about the wedding, which was to be a quiet one at Marian’s home, she went off to school in a maze of wonderment. She had never seen a wedding. She knew vaguely that people always got new clothes for such occasions and that the minister always seemed to be present.