“What’ll I do?” Little Anne looked profoundly downcast for a moment; then she cheered up. “It’s too late now to do anything,” she said in a relieved tone. “Peter’s school gets out at two and it’s ’most noon. I’ll tell him I’m sorry, and I’ll give him—give him—my new blank book. He’ll love it and it’ll be good for him to write these ises in, to remind him his little sister’s sorry—and how she could make him mad, even if she is little!”
Anne grew more and more consoled as she looked longer at the brighter side of her fall.
“And I’ll ask my mother what kind of a sin it was; she knows all about every kind of sin. Should I say the Act of Contrition?”
Little Anne looked ready to fall on her knees and do penance with hearty enjoyment, and Anne said, hastily:
“Better ask your mother about that, too, dear. What a queer child you are!”
Then Anne’s changeable little face lost its elfin look of mingled regret and satisfaction, her eyes dilated and were raised, her lips quivered, a flush slowly spread to her hair; she clasped her thin, quick hands and said:
“Just to be good! Just to be so good that there never would be one stain on me and I’d never be mad, nor make Peter-two mad, but be a white, loving soul in the world!”
Anne looked at her, startled. She was accustomed to little Anne’s flights, her strange, unchildlike aspirations and depths of understanding, and her mercurial falls into human mischief. But there was on her small face now such a rapt look that Anne was conscious of awe that was partly fear. She laid her hand softly on the child’s hair and little Anne came down to earth without the loss of a moment.
“I found something,” she said. “Can Mr. Latham write?”
“Write? Do you mean—— Oh, you mean write as we do, with his own hand?” asked Anne, trying to adjust to this new topic. “Yes. He was not always blind; he lost his sight in an accident. He writes a tiny, tiny hand, hard to read, though every letter is clearly formed. He uses paper with raised lines, else his lines would run together. He does not often try to write; he writes to a few friends, to Mr. Wilberforce most. Why did you ask that, dear?”