"No," said Gypsy, resolutely; "I should have to rip it all out. I'm going to do it right, if it takes me all day." Gypsy began to sew with a will, and Sarah, finding it was for her own interest in the end, stopped talking; so the fearful seam was soon neatly finished, the work folded up, and the thimble and scissors put away carefully in the little green reticule. "I lose so many thimbles,--you don't know!" observed Gypsy, by way of comment. "I'm going to see if I can't keep this one three months." "Now let's go," said Sarah. "In a minute; I must carry my work up first. I'm going to jump off--it's real fun. You see if I don't go as far as that dandelion." So Gypsy sprang from the tree, carrying a shower of blossoms with her. "Oh, look out for the statue!" cried Sarah. The warning came too late. Gypsy fell short of her mark, hit the water-nymph heavily, and it fell with a crash into the water, where the paved bottom was hard as rock. "Just see what you've done!" said Sarah, who had not a capacity for making comforting remarks. "What do you suppose your father will say?" Gypsy stood aghast. The water gurgled over the fallen statue, whose pretty, upraised hands were snapped at the wrist, and the wondering face crushed in. There was a moment's silence. "Don't you tell!" said Sarah at length; "nobody saw it fall, and they'll never think you did it. You just seem surprised, and keep still about it." Gypsy flushed to her forehead. "Why, Sarah Rowe! how can you say such a thing? I wouldn't tell a lie for anything in this world!" "It wouldn't be a lie!" said Sarah, looking ashamed and provoked. "You needn't say you didn't do it." "It would be a lie!" said Gypsy, decidedly. "He'd ask if anybody knew,--I wouldn't be so mean, even if I knew he couldn't find out. I am going to tell him this minute." Gypsy started off, with her cheeks still very red, up the garden paths and down the road, and Sarah followed slowly. Gypsy's sense of honor had received too great a shock for her to take pleasure just then in Sarah's company, and Sarah had an uneasy sense of having lowered herself in her friend's eyes, so the two girls separated for the afternoon. It was about a mile to Mr. Breynton's store. The afternoon was warm for the season, and the road dusty; but Gypsy ran nearly all the way. She was too much troubled about the accident to think of anything else, and in as much haste to tell her father as some children would have been to conceal it from him. Old Mr. Simms, the clerk, looked up over his spectacles in mild astonishment, as Gypsy entered the store flushed, and panting, and pretty. To Mr. Simms, who had no children of his own, and only a deaf wife and a lame dog at home for company, Gypsy was always pretty, always "such a wonderful development for a young person," and always just about right in whatever she did.