Page:Wiggin--Mother Carey's chickens.djvu/149

 and regretting them very much, I have placed the four black and white marble ornaments on my bedroom mantelpiece, there to be a perpetual reminder of my sins. You Dirty Boy is in a hundred pieces in the barn chamber, but if Cousin Ann ever comes to visit us again, I'll be the one to confess that Gilly and I were the cause of the accident."

"Now take your pencil, Nancy, and see where we are in point of income, at the present moment," her mother suggested, with an approving smile. "Put down the pension of thirty dollars a month."

"Down.—Three hundred and sixty dollars."

"Now the hundred dollars over and above the rent of the Charlestown house."

"Down; but it lasts only four years."

"We may all be dead by that time." (This cheerfully from Gilbert.)

"Then the interest on our insurance money. Four per cent on five thousand dollars is two hundred; I have multiplied it twenty times."

"Down.—Two hundred."

"Of course if anything serious happens, or any great need comes, we have the five thousand to draw upon," interpolated Gilbert.

"I will draw upon that to save one of us in illness or to bury one of us," said Mrs. Carey