"What's the matter?" said Mrs. Bonnet, elevating her eyebrows as she appeared at the door and looked into the room she had expected to find dark and still. She held a paper bag; she spoke with an impediment and a breath of peppermint. Her cheek-bones and the end of her nose were brilliant pink with the cold. "What child is that?" Miss Catherine was behind Mrs. Bonnet. "It happened this way, Mrs. Bonnet," she began, and told the story with a little tactful adaptation to the intelligence of her audience, ending, "And now, Mrs. Bonnet, what's to be done?" "Oh, you wicked little brat!" said Mrs. Bonnet. "I just want to get hold of you and shake you!" She made a snatch at Tibbie, who instinctively got beyond her clutch, and turning scared eyes towards Sally, said, just audibly, "I want to go home; I want to go home." "It don't seem possible," said Mrs. Bonnet, bitterly, "that I can't run out a minute just to do an errand for Mrs. Darling herself--to get a spool of feather-stitching silk--but things like this has to happen. Catherine, I thought you, at least, was a responsible person, and here you has to go and--" "Mrs. Bonnet," Catherine interrupted, "you just let that alone! Don't you try none of that with me! I went out of an errand every bit as much as you did. I went out to make sure the ice-cream would be sent in good season for Christmas dinner, I did. Now I don't get dragged into this mess one bit more than you do!" Mrs. Bonnet looked at her with a poison-green eye. She seemed to be repressing what was a trifle difficult to keep the upper hand of. "Well," she exclaimed at last, "Mrs. Darling will be here in a minute, and then we shall all see what we shall see. Lord, ain't that woman been cross to-day, and fussy! 'Tain't as if she was like other people--a little bit sensible, and could take some little few things into consideration, and remember we are all human flesh and blood. Not much! She don't consider nothing, nor nobody, nor feelings, nor circumstances! She just makes things fly! Things has to go her way, every time!" "I want to go home," cried Tibbie, pathetically, and looked towards Sally now with a trembling face. "No, you sha'n't go home," said Bonnet, uglily. "You shall stay right here and take the blame you deserve, after spoiling the face of that handsome doll. What do you mean by it, you little brat, you little gutter imp?" "You let her alone, Mrs. Bonnet," said Sally, with a boldness that had never before characterized her relations with that lady. "Don't you talk to her like that! Any one can see she's as sorry as sorry can be for what she's done, and all the trouble she's got us into--" "And what does that help, I'd like to know? The doll is broke, ain't it? And some one of us is going to catch it, however things go. You're a lucky girl, I say, if you don't lose your place. Some one of us is going to, I can easy foretell."