“No, Peter; she’s ’most always here for our lunch, but Babs has a cold,” little Anne was still able to justify her mother. “And you don’t have to talk to her, Peter; I shall tell her myself, and I am sorry, truly.”
“Heh?” cried Peter, arousing to the fact that Anne was not sorry only that her mother was absent. “What are you sorry about? What’ll you tell her? See here, did you——”
Little Anne nodded hard, choking. Peter looked dreadfully fierce and grown-up, and she became sharply aware that she was only seven.
“You stole——?” Peter’s emotions again choked his speech.
“Your these is—are,” said little Anne, miserably.
“What for?” Peter fairly roared at the trembling child. “What good did it do you, you—you—bad, meddlesome monkey?”
“It was because you said I couldn’t make you mad,” said little Anne, rallying slightly. Peter calling her names was more familiar, less formidable than Peter inarticulate. “I never thought it would make you trouble till Miss Anne said so. I am dreadful sorry, honest I am, Peter-two! I’ll give you my new blank book with the red cover to make rusti—resti—to make up. And your these is—are—is not hurt.”
“Good heavens!” burst out Peter. “You might think it was bric-à-brac! You’d suppose even a kid would know it had to be turned in at school to-day, and isn’t a thing to be harmed. I’m harmed, I’ll tell you that, Miss Anne! I’m disgraced, that’s what! Heaps of the fellows have been getting out of doing these, so the heads made a rule that the next one that didn’t have his paper ready would be made an example. I was it! It’s a thing a fellow can’t live down; I was disgraced. And I hadn’t even a slim excuse to offer. I’d no mortal idea where it was, went to get it out—gone! When I said I’d written it, made a donkey of myself generally, looking like a gibbering idiot, it settled me; ’course they thought I was lying!”
“Tell them it was me, tell them, Peter!” begged little Anne. “I don’t want them to know, but it’s truth, so I must. Tell them, Peter-two, I took it and it wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, I guess!” Peter derided her. “I’d look well saying my kid sister was allowed to rummage my things and steal my papers, now wouldn’t I? I’d look well hiding behind you, my kid sister, wouldn’t I!”