“Look here, Gretel,” said her brother, seriously, and he sat down, and lifted her on his knee. “You are not to think any more about being grateful to me, and all that rubbish. You are my own little sister, and what is mine is yours. I have far more money than I need for myself, and it is my pleasure, as well as my duty, to see that you have everything you ought to have. We are going to be chums, so I don’t want to hear any more about gratitude. Just be happy, and try to like your big brother a little, and it will be all right.”
“Oh, I do like you, indeed I do. I love you better than I ever loved anybody except Father,” cried Gretel, with her arms round her brother’s neck. “I’ll try to be good always, and do everything you want me to, and—and I think perhaps I’d better tell you something. It’s very dreadful, and you may not like me any more when you know about it, but I really think I ought to tell you.”
“What sort of a thing is it?” Mr. Douane asked, as he held his little sister close, and looked down smilingly into the child’s troubled face.
“It’s something I did that was very wicked,” whispered Gretel, hiding her crimson face on his shoulder. “It’s very hard to talk about it.”
“Then don’t talk about it,” said Percy, laughing and kissing her. “I really don’t think I care to know. Come, cheer up, and tell me some more about your shopping expedition. Where did you go for lunch?”
Gretel gave a great sigh of relief. Her brother would never know from what a humiliating confession his kind words had saved her.
“I’ll be so good all the rest of my life that perhaps it won’t matter so very much,” she said to herself when she had gone to bed that night. “Perhaps sometime when I’m grown up I shall be able to earn enough money to buy some poor person a ticket to fairy-land, and then I won’t feel quite so mean and ashamed whenever I think about last Saturday.”
So Gretel silenced conscience, which still persisted in whispering that it would have been better to have told her brother the whole story, and fell asleep, happier than she had ever been since the old days in the studio with her father. As for Mr. Douane himself, he had already forgotten all about the matter.
“She is a dear little thing,” he said to himself, as he sat smoking in the sitting-room after Gretel had left him for the night. “I didn’t quite know what I was in for this morning, but I needn’t have worried so much. I shall have to send the child to some good school before long, I suppose, but in the meantime I believe I am going to rather enjoy having her with me.”