“’Give it to your brother Andrew the minute he comes from school,” she whispered, popping a big chocolate at the same time into the little girl’s mouth.  Bunty was next bribed, with a promise of the same melting delicacies, to run up to Aldith’s with the other letter, and Meg breathed freely ago feeling she had skilfully averted the threatening danger attendant on the evening meeting.

But surely the notes were fated!  Bunty delivered his safely enough to the housemaid at the MacCarthys’, and in answer to the girl’s question “s’posed there was an answer, girls always ’spected one to nothing.”

Aldith was confined to her room with a sudden severe cold, and wrote a note to her friend, telling her how she was too ill to be allowed out, and had written to Mr. Graham, and Mr. Courtney, too, postponing the walk for a week.

Now this note, in its pale pink triangular envelope, was transferred to Bunty’s pocket among his marbles and peanuts and string.  And, as might be expected, he fell in with some other choice spirits on the return journey, and was soon on his knees by the roadside playing marbles.

He lost ten, exclusive of his best agate, fought a boy who had unlawfully possessed himself of his most cherished “conny,” and returned home with saddened spirits an hour later, only to find as he went through the gate that he had lost Aldith’s dainty little note.

Now Meg had promised him eight chocolate walnuts on his return, and if this same boy had one weakness more pronounced than others, it was his extreme partiality for this kind of confectionery, and he had not tasted one for weeks, so no wonder it almost broke his heart to think they would be forfeited.

“I know she’ll be stingy enough to say I haven’t earned them, just ’cause I dropped that girl’s stupid letter,” he said to himself, miserably, “and I don’t suppose there was anything in it but ‘Dearest Marguerite, let us always tell each other our secrets’; I heard her say that twice, and of course she writes it, too.”  Then temptation came upon him swiftly, suddenly.

By nature Bunty was the most arrant little storyteller ever born, and it was only Judy’s fearless honesty and strongly expressed scorn for equivocation that had kept him moderately truthful.  But Judy was miles away, and could not possibly wither him up with her look of utter contempt.  He was at the nursery door now, turning the handle with hesitating hands.

“What a time you’ve been,” said Meg from the table, where she was mending a boxful of her gloves.  “Well, what did she say?”

Just at her elbow was the gay bonbonniere containing the brown, cream-encrusted walnuts.

“She said, ‘All right,’” said Bunty gruffly.

Meg counted the eight chocolates out into his little grimy hand, and resumed her mending with a relieved sigh.  And Bunty, with a defiant, shamed look in his eyes, stuffed the whole of the sweets into his mouth at once, as if to preclude the possibility of a sudden repentance.