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 that he must bring them back this morning and ask your pardon,” said Charlotte, “and when he came running out of the store I suspected what he had done; and when I found out, I made him come back.  Pick up every one, Eddy.”

“Here is one he stepped on his own self and smashed all to nothing,” said Eddy, in an aggrieved tone.  “I can’t pick that up, anyhow.”

“Pick up what you can of it, and put it in the paper bag.”

“I shouldn’t think he could sell this to anybody without cheating them,” remarked Eddy, in a lofty tone, in spite of his abject position.

“Never you mind what he does with it.  You pick up every single speck,” ordered the girl; and the boy scraped the floor with his sharp finger-nails, and crammed the candy and dust into a small paper bag.  The girl stood watchfully over him; not the smallest particle escaped her eyes.  “There’s some more over there,” said she, sharply, when the boy was about to rise; and Eddy loped like some small animal on all-fours towards a tiny heap of crushed peppermint-drops.