Page:Dorothy Canfield - Understood Betsy.djvu/261

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BETSY HAS A BIRTHDAY
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"Well, I'm glad to see ye," she told them soberly. "Sit right down and have some hot milk. I had some all ready."

The telephone rang, she went into the next room, and they heard her saying, in an unsteady voice: "All right, Ann. They're here. Your father just brought them in. I haven't had time to hear about what happened yet. But they're all right. You'd better come home."

"That's your Cousin Ann telephoning from the Marshalls'."

She herself went and sat down heavily, and when Uncle Henry came in a few minutes later she asked him in a rather weak voice for the ammonia bottle. He rushed for it, got her a fan and a drink of cold water, and hung over her anxiously till the color began to come back into her pale face. "I know just how you feel, Mother," he said sympathetically. "When I saw 'em standin' there by the roadside I felt as though somebody had hit me a clip right in the pit of the stomach."

The little girls ate their supper in a tired