"It's all my fault!" she cried, bursting into tears. "Somehow it's all my fault, though I can't tell how, for it was I who said those things. I said those very things, Papa, in your workshop one day when I was in a temper. Don't you recollect the day, Mother,—the day when I didn't go to the picnic, and Baby wouldn't go to sleep, and I slapped him, and you boxed my ears? I went up-stairs, and I was crying, and I said,—yes, I think I said every word of those things, though I forgot all about them till Dolly said them to me this morning, and how she could possibly know, I can't imagine."
"But I can imagine," said her father. "Where did you sit that day, Amy?"
"On the floor, by the door."
"Was there a row of things close by, with tin funnels stuck in them and a cloth over the top?"
"I think there was. I recollect the funnels."
"Then that's all right!" exclaimed Mr. Carpenter, his face clearing up. "Those were the phonographs, Mother, and, don't you see, she must have been exactly opposite one of the funnels, and her voice went in and filled it. It's the best kind of good luck that that cylinder happened to be put into her doll. If all that bad language had gone to anybody else, there would have been the mischief to pay. Folks would have been writing to the papers, as like as not, or the ministers preaching against the dolls as a bad influence. It would have ruined the whole concern, and all your fault, Amy."
"Oh, Papa, how dreadful! how perfectly dreadful!" was all Amy could say, but she sobbed so wildly that her father's anger melted.
"There, don't cry," he said more kindly; "we won't be too hard on you on Christmas Day. Wipe your eyes, and we'll try to think no more about it, especially as the spoiled doll has fallen to your own share, and no real harm is done."
In his relief Mr. Carpenter was disposed to pass lightly over the matter. Not so his wife. She took a more serious view of it.
"You see, Amy," she said that night when they chanced to be alone, "you see how a hasty word sticks and lasts. You never supposed that day that the things you said would ever come back to you again, but here they are."