For just a moment Henrietta Hen stood still. The news almost took her
breath away. Her comb trembled on the top of her head. She even stopped
clucking. And she looked from one to another of her companions as if in
hopes of finding one face, at least, that looked doubtful.... Alas!
Everybody appeared to agree with old Whitey.

"If this is so," Henrietta muttered at last, "it's strange nobody ever
noticed before that there was a duckling in my brood."

"We knew from the very first!" Polly Plymouth Rock told her. "You were
the only one on the farm that didn't see that one of your family was
different from the rest."

All this time the young duckling was swimming further and further away.
He seemed to have forgotten all about his foster mother.

Henrietta Hen took one long last look at him. She guessed that she might
have stood there forever cackling for him to come back and he wouldn't
have paid the slightest heed to her.

Then she gathered her children--her really own--about her. "Come!" she
said to them, "We'll go back home now."

"What about him?" they demanded, pointing to the truant duckling who was
bobbing about on the rippling water. "Aren't you going to make him come,
too?"

"No!" said their mother. "We're well rid of him. He has been more trouble
to me than all the rest of you.... To tell the truth, I never liked him
very well."