roots of the tree and looked after them with her small Medusa face.

"Sally," said Tom, when they reached the kitchen door, and Sally looked
at them in speechless amaze, with a piece of bread-and-butter in her
mouth and a toasting-fork in her hand,--"Sally, tell mother it was
Maggie pushed Lucy into the mud."

"But Lors ha' massy, how did you get near such mud as that?" said Sally,
making a wry face, as she stooped down and examined the _corpus
delicti_.

Tom's imagination had not been rapid and capacious enough to include
this question among the foreseen consequences, but it was no sooner put
than he foresaw whither it tended, and that Maggie would not be
considered the only culprit in the case. He walked quietly away from the
kitchen door, leaving Sally to that pleasure of guessing which active
minds notoriously prefer to ready-made knowledge.

Sally lost no time in presenting Lucy at the parlor door, for to have so
dirty an object introduced into the house at Garum Firs was too great a
weight to be sustained by a single mind.

"Goodness gracious!" aunt Pullet exclaimed, after preluding by an
inarticulate scream; "keep her at the door, Sally! Don't bring her off
the oilcloth, whatever you do."

"Why, she's tumbled into some nasty mud," said Mrs. Tulliver, going up
to Lucy to examine into the amount of damage to clothes for which she
felt herself responsible to her sister Deane.

"If you please, 'um, it was Miss Maggie as pushed her in," said Sally;
"Master Tom's been and said so, and they must ha' been to the pond, for
it's only there they could ha' got into such dirt."

"There it is, Bessy; it's what I've been telling you," said Mrs. Pullet,
in a tone of prophetic sadness; "it's your children,--there's no knowing
what they'll come to."

Mrs. Tulliver was mute, feeling herself a truly wretched mother. As
usual, the thought pressed upon her that people would think she had done
something wicked to deserve her maternal troubles, while Mrs. Pullet
began to give elaborate directions to Sally how to guard the premises
from serious injury in the course of removing the dirt. Meantime tea was
to be brought in by the cook, and the two naughty children were to have
theirs in an ignominious manner in the kitchen. Mrs. Tulliver went out
to speak to these naughty children, supposing them to be close at hand;
but it was not until after some search that she found Tom leaning with a
careless air against the white paling of