"I call breaking a promise telling a lie, Louisa. Did you not tell Mary you would stay in the kitchen till she came back?"
"Well, I meant to stay, mamma, only—" Louisa stopped.
She did not like to say again that she only went out a minute.
"Only you thought of something else you wanted to do, and so broke your promise. The consequence is that all poor Anna's birthday cake is stolen or burnt up. I shall have to leave my work, which is very inconvenient for me, to go into town and buy more; and I shall have to use for it the money I had set apart for another purpose. You can go to your own room and stay there till four o'clock. If it were not for grieving Anna still more, you should not come down again to-day; and you must not ask me for any more pocket-money till after Thanksgiving."
Louisa went to her room crying bitterly, and feeling as though she had been very hardly used.
"Why, Louisa, why are you sitting crying up here to-day, of all days in the year?" asked Aunt Wentworth, Louisa's godmother, who had come out to Anna's party, and had gone up to Louisa's room to arrange her dress and cap. "What has happened to cause so much grief?"
"Mamma sent me up here!" sobbed Louisa. "She won't let me come down till four o'clock, and she says I cannot have one bit of pocket-money till after Thanksgiving—all of three months—only just because I went to the door a minute to see what the expressman had brought for Anna."
"Are you sure that was all?" asked Aunt Wentworth, who, like all the family, had had experience of Louisa's fault. "Was there no more than that about it?"
"Well, I couldn't help it!" replied Louisa, blushing a little. "How could I know that the beggar woman would come into the kitchen and steal the cake, or that the other cakes would burn?"
"Oh!" said Aunt Wentworth. "I begin to understand. You were left in the kitchen to take care of the cake, which was stolen. Is that it?"