Eddy quickly grasped at the lesser evil. “It ain't worth talking about,” he responded, stoutly.
“I can see blood on your knee, dear. It must be bad to make you turn so pale as that.”
With a soft swoop like a mother hen, Mrs. Anderson descended upon the boy, who did not dare resist that gentle authority. She tenderly rolled up the leg of the little knickerbockers and examined the bruised, childish knee. Then she got some witch-hazel and bound it up. While she was doing so, Eddy gazed over her head at Anderson with the knowing and confidential twinkle which one man gives another when tolerant of womanly delusion. He even indulged in an apparently insane chuckle when Mrs. Anderson finished, and smoothed his little, dark head, and told him that now she was sure it would feel better.
“Eddy,” cried Charlotte, “what are you doing so for?”
“Nothing,” replied Eddy. “I was thinking how funny I looked when I tumbled down.” But he rolled his eyes, comically around at Anderson. His arm was paining him frightfully, and it struck him as the most altogether exquisite joke that Mrs. Anderson should be treating his knee, which did not pain him at all, so sympathetically.
Chapter XXVIII
During the progress of the tea at the Andersons' Eddy kept furtively glancing at his sister with an expression which signified congratulation.
“Ain't you glad you stayed?” the expression said, quite plainly.
“Did you ever have such nice things to eat? And only think what a snippy meal we should have had at home!”
Charlotte met the first of the glances with a covertly chiding look and an imperceptible shake of her head; then she refused to meet them, keeping her eyes away from her exultant brother. She herself was actually hungry, poor child, for the truth was that for the last few days it had been somewhat short commons at the Carrolls', and Charlotte was one of the sort who, under such circumstances, are seized with a sudden loss of appetite. She had really eaten very little for some hours, and now, in spite of a curious embarrassment and agitation, which under ordinary circumstances would have lessened her desire for food, she herself ate eagerly. The meal was both dainty and abundant. Mrs. Anderson had always prided herself upon the meals she set before guests. There was always in the house a store of sweets to be drawn from on such occasions, and while Anderson had been binding up Eddy's wound, the maid had been sent to the market for a chicken to supplement the beefsteak which had been intended for the family supper. So there was fried chicken and celery salad, and the most wonderful cream biscuits, and fruit and pound cake, and quince preserves—quarters of delectable, long-drawn-out flavor in a rosy jelly—and tea and thick cream and loaf-sugar in the old, solid service with its squat pieces finished with beading. Eddy gloated over it all openly. He fairly forgot his manners, for, after all, he was, although in a desultory sort of way, a well-bred boy. The Carrolls, as far as their manners went, were gentlefolk, and came of a long line of gentlefolk. But it happened that the china which had come to them from their forebears had for the most part been broken in the course of their wanderings from place to place, and in its place was an ornate and rather costly, and unpaid-for, set. Eddy now quite openly lifted the saucer of thin, pink-and-gold china, in which his teacup rested, and held it to the light.