Dotty looked like an injured lamb, brushed the wayward hair out of her eyes, and gazed wistfully into her sister’s face.

“Is I your little comfort, Susy?  Is I your little comfort?”

“No,” cried Susy, wavering between a smile and a tear; “no, indeed!  To think of your being a comfort!  O, my stars!”

“Well, then,” continued the little one, in a soothing, cooing tone, “then I never broked it; it broked itself!”

So saying, she produced from the depths of her pocket the fragments of the gilt-edged toy.  They were past the healing power even of Spalding’s glue, that was certain.  At the painful sight, poor Susy’s patience flew into as many pieces as the teapot.

“O, you naughty, naughty thing, to say it broke itself!”

“Then it didn’t,” replied the little culprit, not a whit dismayed.  “Then ’twas Prudy.  We was playing ‘thimble-coop.’ She broked it all to smash!”

“O, mother,” said Susy, running out to the kitchen; “Dotty’s making up fibs as fast as she can speak!  You’ll have to shut her up in the closet.”

“Not so fast, my dear.  Let us wait till we hear both sides of the story.”

And, as it turned out, Dotty really did not deserve to be punished for wrong stories.  She and Prudy had each assisted in breaking the teapot; one had knocked it off the bureau, and the other had stepped on it.  But Dotty, who gloried in “a fuss,” had begged to be the one to tell Susy the startling news.  She wished to see her eyes flash, and hear her expressions of surprise.  She knew that, however angry Susy might be, there was one magical sentence which would always her to terms:  “Dotty’ll go out doors, ’out her hat, get cold, have the coop, and DIE!”

At the bare mention of such a fearful thing, Susy’s anger was sure to cool at once.  This time Dotty varied her method a little.

“See,” said she, looking out of the window; “the boys has came.”

Of course that was the last of Susy’s thoughts about the teapot.  She rushed out of doors bareheaded, followed by Dotty.  Eddy Johnson was just hitching Wings to a post near the gate.

“Have they shoed him?” said Susy.

“Shoed him?  I should think they had; all of that,” replied Eddy, indignantly.

“Booted him, more like,” muttered Charley Piper, in the same tone.

“Why, what do you mean, boys?” said Susy, patting the pony, and gazing tenderly into his eyes.

“O, we don’t mean anything, as I know of.  You must run into the house and ask your mother to come out here,” said Eddy, mysteriously.

“Why, it’s my own pony, that my own father gave me, and if there’s anything the matter with it I should think you might tell,” cried Susy, her voice shaking with a vague dread of some terrible mishap.

“Well, may be there isn’t anything ails him,” returned Eddy, coolly.  “I never said there was; but your mother’ll know!”