I’m telling you all this before I tell you what has happened, so you will be sorry for Billy and me.  If you are sorry already, as well indeed you may be, you will be a great deal more sorry before I get through.  For if ever any two persons were “downtrodden and oppressed” and “struggling in darkness” and “feeling the chill waters of affliction,” it’s Billy and me to-night—­all because we tried to help Peggy and Lorraine and Aunt Elizabeth after they had got everything mixed up!  I told them I was just trying to help, and Tom Price said right off that there was only one thing for Billy and me to do in future whenever the “philanthropic spirit began to stir” in us, and that was to get on board the suburban trolley-car and go as far away from home as our nickels would take us, and not hurry back.  So you see he is not a bit grateful for the interesting things I told Maria.

I will now tell what happened.  It began the day Billy heard the station agent at Whitman read Aunt Elizabeth’s telegram to Harry Goward.  The telegram had a lot of silly letters and words in it, so Billy didn’t know what it meant, and, of course, he didn’t care.  The careless child would have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t happened to meet him at Lorraine’s after he got back from Whitman.  He is always going to Lorraine’s for some of Sallie’s cookies—­she makes perfectly delicious ones, round and fat and crumbly, with currants on the top.  Billy had taken so many that his pockets bulged out on the sides, and his mouth was so full he only nodded when he saw me.  So, of course, I stopped to tell him how vulgar that was, and piggish, and to see if he had left any for me, and he was so anxious to divert my mind that as soon as he could speak he began to talk about seeing Aunt Elizabeth over in Whitman.  That interested me, so I got the whole thing out of him, and the very minute he had finished telling it I made him go straight and tell Peggy.  I told him to do it delicately, and not yell it out.  I thought it would cheer and comfort Peggy to know that some one was doing something, instead of standing around and looking solemn, but, alas! it did not, and Billy told me with his own lips that it was simply awful to see Peggy’s face.  Even he noticed it, so it must have been pretty bad.  He said her eyes got so big it made him think of the times she used to imitate the wolf in Red Riding-Hood and scare us ’most to death when we were young.

When Billy told me that, I saw that perhaps we shouldn’t have told Peggy, so the next day I went over to Lorraine’s again to ask her what she thought about it.  I stopped at noon on my way home from school, and I didn’t ring the bell, because I never do.  I walked right in as usual, falling over the books and teacups and magazines on the floor, and I found Lorraine sitting at the tea-table with her head down among the little cakes and bits of toast left over from the afternoon before.  She didn’t look up, so I knew she hadn’t heard me, and I saw