“But why didn’t you come and tell us?” asked David. “Here we’ve been looking all over for you. Why didn’t you sing out?”
“I was going to,” admitted Sunny Boy apologetically. “But when I was hunting for the way into the barn, I found the ducks. Let’s go and tell Grandma we saw ’em.”
It was noon by this time, so the Hatch children went home and Sunny Boy and Jimmie walked together to the house. It had stopped raining, and the sun felt warm and delightful.
“Of course you may have a duck,” said Grandma, when Sunny Boy told her of his find. “That foolish old mother duck marched off with her children one morning and I couldn’t for the life of me discover where she had gone. And Grandpa must board over that hole if you are going to play in the haymow. Another time you might hurt yourself, falling like that.”
“Where’s Mother?” asked Sunny Boy, eager to tell her about the morning’s fun.
“I believe she is up in the attic,” returned Grandma. “She’s been up there for an hour or so. I wish, lambie, you’d run and find her and say dinner will be on the table in half an hour.”
Sunny climbed the crooked, steep stairs that led to Grandma’s attic, and found Mother bending over an old trunk dragged out to the middle of the floor.
“Mother,” he began as soon as he saw her, “we’ve been sliding on the hay, and I found a duck mother, an’ Grandma gave me a duck for my own. What are you doing, Mother?”
Mrs. Horton was sitting on the floor, her lap filled with a bundle of old letters.
“I’ve been having a delightful morning, too,” she said. “Grandma started to go over these old trunks with me, and then some one called her on the telephone and she had to go down. See, precious, here is a picture of Daddy when he was a little boy.”