when she kisses you good night. Then
after the roast I will go to your house, and climb up that tree, and
go to bed in your room. And I will have one of your gingham dresses to
wear, and very early in the morning I will get up, and you get up, and
we both of us can get down the back stairs without being seen, and run
home."

Amelia was almost weeping. It was her worshiped Lily's plan, but she was
horribly scared. "I don't know," she faltered.

"Don't know! You've got to! You don't love me one single bit or you
wouldn't stop to think about whether you didn't know." It was the
world-old argument which floors love. Amelia succumbed.

The next evening a frightened little girl clad in one of Lily Jennings's
white embroidered frocks was racing to the Jenningses' house, and
another little girl, not at all frightened, but enjoying the stimulus of
mischief and unwontedness, was racing to the wood behind Dr. Trumbull's
house, and that little girl was clad in one of Amelia Wheeler's
ginghams. But the plan went all awry.

Lily waited, snuggled up behind an alder-bush, and the boys came, one by
one, and she heard this whispered, although there was no necessity for
whispering, "Jim Patterson, where's that hen?"

"Couldn't get her. Grabbed her, and all her tail-feathers came out in a
bunch right in my hand, and she squawked so, father heard. He was in his
study writing his sermon, and he came out, and if I hadn't hid behind
the chicken-coop and then run I couldn't have got here. But I can't see
as you've got any corn, Johnny Trumbull."

"Couldn't. Every single ear was cooked for dinner."

"I couldn't bring any cookies, either," said Lee Westminster; "there
weren't any cookies in the jar."

"And I couldn't bring the potatoes, because the outside cellar door was
locked," said Arnold Carruth. "I had to go down the back stairs and out
the south door, and the inside cellar door opens out of our dining-room,
and I daren't go in there."

"Then we might as well go home," said Johnny Trumbull. "If I had
been you, Jim Patterson, I would have brought that old hen if her
tail-feathers had come out. Seems to me you scare awful easy."

"Guess if you had heard her squawk!" said Jim, resentfully. "If you want
to try to lick me, come on, Johnny Trumbull. Guess you don't darse call
me scared again."

Johnny eyed him standing there in the gloom. Jim was not large, but
very wiry, and the ground was not suited for combat. Johnny, although a