HE next anxiety was the baby, who contrived to tumble himself over in his high chair, and cried loudly. Eurie ran. Dr. Mitchell was always so troubled about bumps on the head. She bathed this in cold water, and in arnica, and petted, and soothed, and pacified as well as she could a child who thought it a special and unendurable state of things not to have mamma and nobody else. Between the petting she administered wholesome reproof to Jennie.
"If you hadn't been reading, instead of attending to him this would not have happened I wish I had told mother to lock up all the books before she went. You are great help; worth while to stay from school to bury yourself in a book."
"I haven't read a dozen pages this morning," Jennie said, with glowing cheeks. "He was sitting in his high chair, just as he always is, and I had stepped across the room to get a picture-book for Robbie. How could I know that he was going to fall? I don't think you are very kind, anyway, when I am helping all that I can, and losing school besides."
And Miss Jennie put on an air of lofty and injured innocence.
"I believe she is sweeping right on the bread," said Eurie, her thoughts turned into another channel. "Go and see, Jennie."
Jennie went, and returned as full of comfort as any of Job's friends.
"She swept right straight at it; and she left the door open, and the wind blew the cloth off, and a great hunk of dust and dirt lies right on top of one loaf, and the clothes are boiling over on the others. Nice bread you'll have!"
Before this sentence was half finished, Eurie sat the baby on the floor and ran, stopping only to give orders that Jennie should not let him go to sleep for anything.
The door-bell was the next sound that tried her nerves. The little parlor where they had lingered late, she and Nellis, last evening, when they had a pleasant talk together, the pleasantest she had ever had with that brother; now she remembered how it looked; how he had said, as he glanced back when they were leaving: