“Well, I’ll go with you,” said Jimmy-boy.
“If you’re going, I’ll have to go too,” piped wee Lucy.
“Of course,” thought Edith. “And there’s the dog, he’ll have to follow,—the ‘inevitable dog,’ Aunt Vi calls him. Oh, dear!”
“If the whole family is to go, we may as well have more errands done!” exclaimed mamma with a playful smile. “Can I trust you, Edith, to call at our grocer’s, Mr. Ladd’s, and ask him to send me two pounds of Santa Isabel butter?”
“‘Can I trust you?’” repeated Edith to herself. “Why do people always say that to me, as if they didn’t feel sure?”
“Yes, mamma,” she added aloud; “two pounds blue silk, two spools San Isabel’s butter;” then corrected her own mistake, laughing.
The little party went skipping along in a very gay mood, the “inevitable dog” at their heels. Instead of proceeding at once to the stores, Edith chose to go two or three blocks out of the way, to watch a couple of tiny boys riding together on the back of a burro, and to see how fast the workmen were getting on in building a tall house she greatly admired.
They passed Mrs. Phillips’s brown cottage, with the bird-of-paradise flowers in the garden. Edith had a fancy for these gay, graceful flowers, with their very long scarlet streamers floating on the air like little banners. But just now she should not have gone that way; it was one of her mistakes. Her mother had said to her only the day before,—
“Edith, when you are out with Lucy, I would prefer you shouldn’t go near Mrs. Phillips’s house, for I don’t like to expose Lucy to whooping-cough.”
Edith would not have “exposed” her little sister on any account if she had only stopped to think. She believed whooping-cough to be almost sure death. Hadn’t she had it herself just before Jimmy was born, and nearly died of it? So she firmly believed. At any rate, the nurse, Mrs. Chick, had not allowed her to go near the new baby,—only think of that! She had had to look at Jimmy through the window! She was only two years old at the time, and could not remember anything about it, but this was what everybody said. It had always impressed Edith as something very strange and dreadful, that she had been shut away like that from her own baby Jimmy! And, after all, he had had whooping-cough just the same.