"Ella will not go home; mother will smack her for calling the camel a—"
"Hist, thou little goose; mother will do nothing of the kind. Get up quickly, or I will not carry thee at all; there, hold on tightly now and keep thy heels quiet, for it is getting so dark and the stairs are so narrow I might fall down and break thy neck. Say good-evening now to Violet, and away we go."
He carried Ella over to Violet's chair, and the little maiden put her soft loving arms about her neck and kissed her with all the strength of her childish heart.
"Ella did not make thee cry, Violet, did she? Ella did not know that thou wast so fond of the poor—" She did not finish her sentence, for Fritz whirled her away suddenly.
But Violet called down the stairs after her, "Ella did not make Violet cry; Ella is a good girl. Good-evening, sweet Ella."
It was almost dusk when Fritz returned, and John had not yet come home. Violet heard the boy's step on the stairs, and her heart beat so fast that the neck of her little purple frock heaved up and down flutteringly.
She had packed away all the animals she could fit into the Noah's ark, and the others she had placed in a heap on the window-sill. There was nothing now on the table before her but her mother's Bible and the book with the gold-spotted cover.
For the twentieth time since Fritz had left the room, she had opened this book at the picture of the little hunchback and as hastily closed it again. "I will ask him first, and then I will show it to him," she said in a whisper to herself as she looked up nervously at the opening door.
But Fritz came in quite unconscious of the fluttering heart; his own was beating so hard that he had to sit down on the chair by the stove to get his breath, and it was some moments before he gasped,—
"Well, if ever I take that great fat Ella on my back again! I would rather carry a cow to market on my shoulders than have her hanging on to my neck and throttling me. First she made me carry her up to the top of the house, to the very garret, because she said mother was there; and then all the way down again, because she said mother was in the bakehouse. Then I had to haul her all the way off again down the street to Madame Bellard's, and up to the top of that house, where we found mother and Madame Bollard crying over their coffee like two sea-crabs; and there I left Ella gaping at them with her eyes nearly falling out on her cheeks. Pah! she weighs at the least three tons."