"I am so sorry not to have come up before, dears, but I have been very busy. Has it been a very dull afternoon for my poor little prisoners?"
"Not so very," said Dolly, slipping off her seat, and sidling up to her mother, who had settled herself on the old rocking-chair by the fire, with a nice comfortable look, as if she were not in a hurry. "Not so very—we read some stories, and I did six rows of my knitting, and Max cut out some more paper animals for poor little Billy Stokes—and—then we went to our windows and began looking out," but here Dolly's voice dropped suspiciously.
"Well," said her mother, "that all sounds very nice. But what happened when you were looking out at your windows?"
"Nothing happened," said Max, slowly.
"Well—what did you see? And what did you say? I can tell from your faces that things haven't gone cheerfully with you all the afternoon—now have they?" said mamma.
"No," Dolly replied eagerly, "they haven't. Only p'r'aps we'd better say nothing more about it. I don't want it all to begin again. If Max likes I'll try to forget all about it, and be friends again."
"I don't mind being friends again," said Max, "I'd rather. But I don't see how we can forget about it—they're sure to be there again to-morrow, and then we couldn't forget about them. Oh, I wonder if they're there still, if it's not too dark to see them," he went on, suddenly darting to the window. "Then mamma could count them, and that would settle it."
"This is very mysterious," said mamma, smiling, "Dolly, you must explain."
But Max was back from the window before Dolly could begin, and his first words were part of the explanation.
"They're gone in," he said in a disappointed tone, "but I don't know that it matters much. For it would have been too dark for you to count them properly, mamma. It was a lot of little pigs, mamma, in Farmer Wilder's field; little black pigs—twelve of them."