[XXIV.]
BROWN BETTY.
Mrs. Whitney sat in her room, her soft hair floating over her dressing-gown, with little Dick in her arms, just as he had run wailing with his story of distress.
“My throat isn’t sore,” he screamed between his tears; “and I want to go out with the other boys.”
Polly, running along the hall, with a new book that Jasper had loaned her tucked under her arm, a happy half-hour dancing before her eyes, heard him, and stopped suddenly, then she turned back, and put her brown head in the doorway.
“Oh, dear!” and she came close to Mrs. Whitney’s chair.
“I’m not sick,—and I want to go out with the boys,” roared Dick, worse than ever. “I want to go out—I want to go out.”
“I suppose that’s just what Brown Betty cried,” said Polly, saying the first thing that popped into her head of all the stories she used to tell in The Little Brown House.
“Eh?” Little Dick lifted his head from the nest where he had burrowed under his mother’s soft hair, and regarded her closely through his tears.
Polly knelt down by Mrs. Whitney’s side, and turned her back on Jasper’s new book, where she laid it on the floor. “You don’t know how Brown Betty wanted to get out,” she said; “but she couldn’t do it, not a bit of it.”