ep again.

But, at that moment they came in sight of the blind girl's home, where
she was waiting with keen anticipation to receive them.

Bertha had other visitors as well that day, and the picnic dinner
proceeded in a very stately and dignified manner. Miss Slowboy was
isolated, for the time being, from every article of furniture but the
chair she sat on, that she might have nothing else to knock the baby's
head against, and sat staring about her in unspeakable delight. To her
the day was all too short, and when that evening John Peerybingle making
his return trip, called to take them home, Miss Slowboy's regret
was intense.

As long as her little mistress smiled, Tilly's face too was wreathed in
smiles; but when a hidden shadow darkened the Perrybingle sky,
overclouding the happiness of the little home, and Dot cried all night,
Tilly's eyes were red and swollen too, the next morning.

It happened in this way. Pretty little Dot gave good John Perrybingle
cause for anxiety by her actions, and the honest carrier, disturbed and
misled, felt that he had reason to doubt her love for him, which almost
broke his honest, faithful heart. While he was worrying over this, and
over her, his little wife was merely shielding a secret belonging to
Edward Plummer, Bertha's brother, who had just come back, after many
year's absence in the golden South Americas.

So unaccustomed was Dot to keeping a secret that it caused her to act
very strangely, and give her husband reason to misjudge her, which
almost broke her loving little heart. All of which trouble Tilly Slowboy
did not understand, but was deeply affected by it, and when she found
her mistress alone, sobbing piteously, was quite horrified, exclaiming:

"Ow, if you please, don't! It's enough to dead and bury the baby, so it
is, if you please!"

"Will you bring him sometimes, to see his father, Tilly?" inquired her
mistress, drying her eyes; "when I can't live here, and have gone to my
old home?"

"Ow, if you please, _don't!_" cried Tilly, throwing back her head and
bursting out into a howl--she looked at the moment uncommonly like
Boxer--"Ow, if you please, don't! Ow, what has everybody been and gone
and done with everybody, making everybody else so wretched. Ow-w-w-w!"

The soft-hearted Slowboy trailed off at this juncture, into such a
deplorable howl, the more tremendous from its long suppression, that she
must infallibly have wakened the baby and frightened him into