"Will you have pudding, dear? I have asked you three times," said Mrs. Mason's voice, with a little extra energy in it; and Kathie looked up out of her dream with a certain vagueness in her eyes, and answered,—
"A hundred and twenty-five," whereat they all laughed.
"I can't give you a hundred and twenty-five puddings; but, if you'll please make a beginning with this one, no doubt the rest will come before the year is over."
Whereupon Kathie roused herself from her speculations, ate her pudding, and sent her plate for more, with a good, healthy, girlish appetite.
That afternoon she sewed quite diligently, and talked little; but her eyes were bright, and her face all the time eager with some thought.
After tea was over, and Miss Atkinson had gone, and papa had stepped out to see a business friend, Kathie sat down, as was one of her habits, on a low stool beside her mother, and laid her head in her lap. Mrs. Mason knew that all the afternoon's thinking would come out before the child got up again; so she just smoothed the fluffy, yellow hair with her hand and waited.
"Don't you think, mamma, that Miss Atkinson must be a good deal better Christian than the rest of us, she's such a patient burden-bearer? She never seemed to think for one moment that it was hard she should have to work so, or that she couldn't have what she wanted herself. All that troubled her was because she couldn't do what she had planned for Alice."
Then, when Mrs. Mason had made some slight answer, there was silence again for a time; and then Kathie cried impulsively,—
"Mamma, what a perfect good-for-nothing I am. I never carried a burden for any one in my life. I have just been a dead weight on some one else's hands."