"

The boy wriggled defiantly, but she held to him with wonderful
strength.

"Right away," she repeated, "every single one."

"Let me go, then," growled the boy, angrily. "How can I pick them up
when you are holding me this way?"

The girl with a swift motion swung to the office door in the faces of
the two clerks, the grinning roundness of the younger, and the
half-abstracted bewilderment of the elder. Then she placed her back
against it, and took her hand from her brother's arm. "Now, then,
pick them up, every one," said she.

Without another word the boy got down on his hands and knees and
began gathering up the scattered sweets. Anderson had risen to his
feet, and stood looking on with a dazed and helpless feeling. Now he
spoke, and he realized that his voice sounded weak.

"Really, Miss Carroll," he said, "I beg-- It is of no consequence--"
Then he stopped. He did not know what it was all about; he had only a
faint idea of not putting any one to the trouble to pick up the
debris on his office floor.

Charlotte regarded him as sternly as she had her brother. "Yes, it is
of consequence. Papa told him to bring them back and apologize."

Anderson stared at her, bewildered, while the little boy crawled like
a nervous spider around his feet.

"Why bring them back to me?" he queried. For the moment the ex-lawyer
forgot that molasses-peppermint balls yielded a part of his revenue,
and were offered by him to the public from a glass jar on his shelf.
He cast about in his mind as to what he could possibly have to do
with those small, hard, brown lollipops rolling about on his office
floor.

"You had them in a glass jar," said Charlotte, in an accusing voice,
"right in his way, and--when he came home last night he had them in
his pocket, and--papa whipped him very hard. He always does when-- My
brother is never allowed to take anything that does not belong to
him, however unimportant," she concluded, proudly.

Anderson continued to look at her in a sort of daze.

"No," she added, severely, "he is not. No matter if he is so young,
no more than a child, and a child is very fond of sweets, and--they
were left right in his way."

Anderson looked at her with the vague idea floating through his mind
that he owed this sweet, reproachful creature an abject pardon for
keeping his molasses-peppermint balls in a glass jar on his own shelf
and not locking them away from the lustful eyes of small boys.

"Papa told Eddy t