"That is poetry, auntie; you made a beautiful rhyme," laughed Louise. But her aunt refused to smile.
"It is not poetry, but sad fact, I'm afraid. You may not have done much actual harm, but you have shown no respect for other people's property. You went into the Brown house garden without leave, and you encouraged Ikey to carry off his grandmother's things without permission. I have trusted you all summer—I thought I could; but this makes me afraid that you ought to have someone with more experience to watch over you. You know when I came back to you two years ago I promised to stay so long as I could be a help to you, but—"
"Oh, Aunt Zélie! You do help us—don't go away!" cried Bess, clasping her around the waist; Louise seized one of her hands tightly in both her own, and Carl looked out the window with a flushed face.
"That is not fair, Aunt Zélie," was all he said.
He could never forget—nor could Bess—how she had come to them in their loneliness, and taken the motherless little flock into her arms, comforting them and wrapping them all about with her love and sympathy. How could they ever do without her?
"You aren't going away, are you?" Helen asked, leaving her dolls and coming to her side.
"I hope not, for I can't think what I should do without my children," she answered. And then they all snuggled around her on the old sofa and talked things over. It was astonishing what a difference it made—trying to look at the matter from all sides. Even Mrs. Ford's indignation did not seem so very unreasonable when you stopped to think how inconvenient it was to be without clothes-pins on Monday morning.
"I know it does not seem exactly right as you put it, Aunt Zélie," Carl acknowledged, "but it was such fun, we couldn't have had so good a time anywhere else."
"Suppose you found the Arnold children playing in our garden some day, would you think that because they had found that they couldn't have so good a time anywhere else, it was all right?"
"Why, auntie, those Arnold boys are not nice at all; we couldn't have them in our garden," cried Louise.