“He must have stepped on this, too,” he muttered, with a reproachful glare at Anderson, who had never in his life felt so at a loss.  He was divided between consternation and an almost paralyzing sense of the ridiculous.  He was conscious that a laugh would be regarded as an insult by this very angry and earnest young girl.  But at last Eddy tendered him the bag with the rescued peppermint-drops.

“I shouldn’t think you would ask more than half-price for candy like this, anyway,” said Eddy, admonishingly, and that was too much for the man.  He shouted with laughter; not even Charlotte’s face, which suddenly flushed with wrath, could sober him.  She looked at him a moment while he laughed, and her face of severe judgment and anger intensified.

“Very well,” said she, “if you see anything funny about this, I am glad, Mr. Anderson.”

But the boy, who had viewed with doubt and suspicion this abrupt change of aspect on the part of the man, suddenly grinned in response; his black eyes twinkled charmingly with delight and fun.  “Say, you’re all right,” he said to Anderson, with a confidential nod.

“Eddy!” cried Charlotte.

“Now, Charlotte, you don’t see how funny it is, because you are a girl,” said Eddy, soothingly, and he continued to grin at the man, half-elfishly, half-innocently.  He looked very small and young.

The girl caught hold of his arm.  “Come away immediately,” she said, in a choking voice.  “Immediately.”

“It’s just like a girl to act that way about my going, as if I wanted to come myself at all,” said the boy, following his sister’s pulling hand, and still grinning understandingly at Anderson over his shoulder.

Charlotte turned in the doorway and looked majestically at Anderson.  “I thought, when I obliged my brother to return here and pick up the candy, that I was dealing with a gentleman,” said she.  “Otherwise I might not have considered it necessary.”

Even then Anderson could scarcely restrain his laughter, although he was conscious that he was mortally offending her.  He managed to gasp out something about his surprise and the triviality of the whole affair of the candy.

“I regret that you should consider the taking anything without leave, however worthless, as trivial,” said she.  “I have not been so brought up, and neither has my brother.”  She said this with an indescribable air of offended rectitude.  She regarded him like a small, incarnate truth and honesty.  Then she turned, and her brother was following with a reluctant backward pull at her leading hand, when suddenly he burst forth with a shout of malicious glee.

“Say, you are making me go away, when I haven’t given him back his old candy, after all!  He didn’t take it.”

Charlotte promptly caught the paper bag from her brother’s hand, advanced upon Anderson, and thrust it in his face as if it had been a hostile weapon.  Anderson took it perforce.