"
Bee's heart began to beat faster with a strange hope. She had seen
Fixie's face looking troubled, and she remembered Martha saying how
her questioning about the necklace had upset him, and it seemed almost
cruel to go on talking about it. But a feeling had come over her that
there was something to find out, and now it grew stronger and
stronger.
"Lace for Rosy's neck," she repeated, "no, Fixie, you must be
mistaken. Lace for her neck--" and then a sudden idea struck her,--"can
you mean a _necklace?_ Don't you know that a necklace means
beads?"
Fixie stared at her for a moment, growing very red. Then the redness
finished up, like a thundercloud breaking into rain, by his bursting
into tears, and hiding his face in Bee's lap.
"I didn't know, I didn't know," he cried, "I thought it was some lace
that Martha meant. I didn't mean to tell a' untrue, Bee. I didn't like
Martha asking me, 'cos it made me think of the beads I'd lost, and I
thought p'raps I'd get them up again when I came home, but I can't.
I've poked and poked, and I think the mouses have eatened zem."
By degrees Bee found out what the poor little fellow meant. The
morning after the afternoon when Bee and he had had the necklace, and
Bee had put it safely back, he had, unknown to any one, fetched it
again for himself, and sat playing with it by the nursery-window, in
the corner where the hole in the floor was.
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