Poor Nelly! she had not much appet.i.te for breakfast, and the first thing she did when Mamma's dear face appeared at the door was to burst into tears.

But such tears do good, and still more relief was the telling the whole story, ending up with--

"Oh, Mamma, dear Mamma, I couldn't bear to think I had told you what was _not quite true_. And Willie feels just the same."

For Willie had crept in too, looking very grave, and winking his eyes hard to keep from crying.

It was all put right, of course; there was really no need for their Mother to show them where they had been wrong. They knew it so well. And Leigh did not get ill, after all.

Freda Kingley had had a lesson too, I am glad to say.

That very afternoon she and Hugh walked over to Halling Park, to "find out" if Leigh was all right.

And this gave Mrs. Frere a good opportunity of showing the kind-hearted but thoughtless children the risk they had run of getting themselves and their little friends into real trouble--above all, by concealing their foolish play, and causing Nelly and her little brothers for the first time in their lives to act at all deceitfully.

"You will be afraid to let them play with us any more," said Freda very sadly, "and I'm sure I don't wonder."

"No, dear," said her new friend. "On the contrary, I shall now feel sure that I _may trust_ you and Hugh and Maggie."

Freda grew red with pleasure.

"You may indeed," she said; "I promise you we won't lead them into mischief and--and if ever we do, we'll tell you all about it at once."

Mrs. Frere laughed at this quaint way of putting it.

"I don't think my children will be any the worse for a little more 'running wild' than they have had," she said.

"And we won't be any the worse for having to think a little before we rush off on some fun," said Freda. "I really never did see before how very easy it would be to get into telling regular _stories_, if you don't take care."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Chimney Corner]

by

Frances E. Crompton

"IT'S a welly anxietious thing, yoasting chestnuts is," Rupert said, shaking his head seriously.

Rupert is only four years old, but he is very fond of grand words. He speaks quite plainly and nicely, Nurse says (excepting the _v_'s and _r_'s), only, of course, he cannot remember always just the shape of the big words; but he uses much grander ones than I do, though I am nearly six.

But he is the nicest little boy in all the world, and we do love each other better than anybody else at all, after Mother and Father.

We made what Rupert calls an "arranglement" about always being friends with each other; that was the night we roasted the chestnuts.

It was one of the most interesting things we had ever done--and then to be allowed to do it alone! You see, this was the way.

It was the dreadfullest day we can remember in all our lives.

Because you know, first of all, Mother was so ill. And then there was a birthday party we were to have gone to.

And Sarah, who is the housemaid, said she didn't see why we couldn't go just the same, and Nurse said very sharply:

"I'm not going to let them go, I can tell you, with things as they are."

And then she said, in another kind of voice:

"Just suppose they had to be sent for to go in to the mistress----"

And then she went away again into Mother's dressing-room.

That was another horrid thing, that n.o.body seemed to be able to look after us at all; we could have got into all sorts of mischief if we had wanted, but everything was so dreadful that it made us not want.

There were two doctors, who went and came several times, and someone they called Nurse, but she wasn't our Nurse.

And our Nurse could not be in the nursery with us, but kept shutting herself up in Mother's dressing-room, and that made us be getting into everybody's way.

So at last, when evening came, Nurse sent us down to the drawing-room, because somebody had let the nursery fire go almost out, and she told us to stay there and be good, and Father said he would perhaps come and sit with us by-and-by.

But I don't know what we should have done there so long if Sarah had not brought us a plate of chestnuts, and shown us how to roast them.

(We feel sure that Nurse would not have allowed it by ourselves, and would have called it "playing with fire," but Father looked in at us once, and did not stop us at all, but only said we were very good, and Cook and Sarah kept looking in too, and they were very kind, only rather quiet and queer.)

[Ill.u.s.tration]

So that was how it was that we came to be allowed to be roasting chestnuts in the drawing-room by ourselves, which does seem a little funny, if you did not know about that dreadful day.

"There's only two left now," Rupert said.

We hadn't eaten all the plateful, of course, because so many of them, when they popped, had popped quite into the fire, and we were not to try to get them out.

We had roasted one each for Sarah, and for Cook, and for Nurse, and for Father, and of course the biggest of all for Mother.

We thought she might enjoy it when she got better. And they were all done, and there were only two left besides what we had eaten and lost.

So we put them together on the bar to roast, and Rupert said:

"One for you, and one for me. Yours is the light one, and mine is the dark one."

And I said:

"Yes, and let us do them as Sarah did with two of them, and try if they will keep together till they are properly done, and then it will be as if we kept good friends and loved each other always."

So that was what Rupert called the "anxietious" part, because, you know, one of them might have flown into the fire before the other was roasted, and we were so excited about it that I believe we should have cried.