I felt sorry, then.  I wanted to cry out, as Stuart had done when he shot his great-great-grandfather’s portrait, “Oh, Aunt Patricia, I’m so sorry!  It was an accident.  I didn’t mean to do it, truly I didn’t mean to!” But she couldn’t understand monkey language, and man’s speech has been denied us, so I only hugged the limb closer and watched in silence.

I stayed in that tree all day.  The boys came home from school, and called and called me, but I kept as still as a mouse.  It was not until long after dark that I crawled up the lightning-rod and slipped through the window into my room in the attic.  Phil found me there the next morning when he began his search again.  He squeezed me until I ached, he was so glad to see me.  Then he and Elsie brought me my breakfast and sat on the floor, half crying as they watched me eat, for the order had gone forth that I must be sent away.  The doctor could forgive his boys when they did wrong, but he couldn’t make any allowance for me.

“I think it’s too bad that we have to give up the very nicest pet we ever had, just because Aunt Patricia don’t like him,” exclaimed Phil, mournfully.  “Dago didn’t do much mischief that can’t be mended.  Carnelian rings are as cheap as anything.  Nora said so.  It would be easy enough to get her another one as good as the one Dago lost, and I’d be only too glad to give her my big silver dollar in place of the gold one.  That would be better than the one she had before, for mine hasn’t any hole in it.  Dick’s tail-feathers will grow out again, and everything could be fixed as good as new except the old blue dragon, and he was too ugly to make a fuss about, anyhow!”

“He always had good sugar-plums in him, though,” said little Elsie, who had had her full share of them, and who had so many sweet memories of the dragon that she looked upon it as a friend.

“I don’t care!  I love Dago a thousand times more than she could possibly love an old piece of china or a gold dollar with a hole in it.  I wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for Dago, and Aunt Patricia is a mean old thing to make papa say that we have to give him up.  I wished I dared tell her so.  I should like to stand outside her door and holler at the top of my voice: 

    “Old Aunt Pat
    You’re mean as a rat!”

“Why, Philip Tremont!” cried Elsie, in a shocked voice.  “Something awful will happen to you if you talk that way.  She isn’t just your aunt, she’s your great-aunt, too, in the bargain, and she’s an old, old lady.”

“Well, I would!” insisted Phil.  “I don’t care what you say.”  Just then a faint sound of music, far-away down the street, but steadily coming nearer, floated up the attic stairs.  The children ran to the window to listen, hanging recklessly out over the sill.

“It’s a grind-organ man!” cried Elsie, “and he’s got a monkey.”

“I wonder how Dago would act if he were to see one of his own family,” said Phil.  “Come on, let’s take him down and see.”