. "I'm
awful sorry for Jimmy--but I _must_ go to the picnic."

"I s'pose you feel so," said Mrs. Ross, sighing heavily. "I dunno's I
blame you. Picnics is more cheerful than staying with a poor little
lame boy, I don't doubt. Well, I s'pose I can put Jimmy's supper on
the table clost to him, and shut the cat in with him, and mebbe he'll
worry through. He was counting on having you to fiddle for him,
though. Jimmy's crazy about music, and he don't never hear much of it.
Speaking of fiddling, there's a great fiddler stopping at the hotel
now. His name is Blair Milford, and he makes his living fiddling at
concerts. I knew him well when he was a child--I was nurse in his
father's family. He was a taking little chap, and I was real fond of
him. Well, I must be getting. Jimmy'll feel bad at staying alone, but
I'll tell him he'll just have to put up with it."

Mrs. Ross sighed herself away, and Ted flew up to his garret corner
with a choking in his throat. He couldn't go to stay with Jimmy--he
couldn't give up the picnic! Why, he had never been at a picnic; and
they were going to drive to the hotel beach in wagons, and have
swings, and games, and ice cream, and a boat sail to Curtain Island!
He had been looking forward to it, waking and dreaming, for a
fortnight. He _must_ go. But poor little Jimmy! It was too bad for him
to be left all alone.

"I wouldn't like it myself," said Ted miserably, trying to swallow a
lump that persisted in coming up in his throat. "It must be dreadful
to have to lie on the sofa all the time and never be able to run,
climb trees or play, or do a single thing. And Jimmy doesn't like
reading much. He'll be dreadful lonesome. I'll be thinking of him all
the time at the picnic--I know I will. I suppose I _could_ go and
stay with him, if I just made up my mind to it."

Making up his mind to it was a slow and difficult process. But when
Ted was finally dressed in his shabby, "skimpy" Sunday best, he tucked
his precious fiddle under his arm and slipped downstairs. "Please, I
think I'll go and stay with Jimmy," he said to Mrs. Jackson timidly,
as he always spoke to her.

"Well, if you're to waste the afternoon, I s'pose it's better to waste
it that way than in going to a picnic and eating yourself sick," was
Mrs. Jackson's ungracious response.

Ted reached Mrs. Ross's little house just as that good lady was
locking the door on Jimmy and the cat. "Well, I'm real glad," she
said, when Ted told her he