Whipple they had looked with especial awe. Other known members of the tribe were inhumanly old and gray and withered, not creatures with whom the most daring fancy could picture the Cowan twins sustaining any sane human relationship. But this one was young and moderately understandable. Observed from across the room of the Methodist Sunday-school, she was undoubtedly human like them; but always so befurbished with rare and shining garments, with glistening silks and costly velvets and laces, with bonnets of pink rosebuds and gloves of kid, that the thought of any secular relationship had been preposterous. Yet she was young, an animal of their own age, whose ways could be comprehended.
She halted her mad flight when she discovered them, then turned to survey the way she had come. She was panting. The twins regarded her stonily, shaping defenses if she brought up anything regarding any one who might have mocked Jonas Whipple.
When again she could breathe evenly, she said: "It was Cousin Juliana driving by was why I dashed in here. I think I have foiled her."
She was not now the creature of troubled elegance that Sabbaths had revealed her. The gingham dress was such as a daughter of the people might have worn, and the straw hat, though beribboned, was not impressive. She was a bony little girl, with quick, greenish eyes and a meagre pigtail of hair of the hue that will often cause a girl to be called Carrots. Her thin, eager face was lavishly freckled; her nose was trivial to the last extreme. Besides her hat, she carried and now nonchalantly drew refreshment from a stick of spirally striped candy inserted for half its length through the end of a lemon. The candy was evidently of a porous texture, so that the juice of the fruit would reach the consumer's pursed lips charmingly modified by its passage along the length of the sweet. One needed but to approximate a vacuum at the upper end of the candy, and the mighty and mysterious laws of atmospheric pressure completed the benign process.
It should be said for the twins that they were not social climbers. In their instant infatuation for this novel device they quite lost the thrill that should have been theirs from the higher aspects of the encounter. They were not impressed at meeting a Whipple on terms of seeming equality. They had eyes and desire solely for this delectable refection. Again and again the owner enveloped the top of the candy with prehensile lips; deep cavities appeared in her profusely spangled cheeks. Her eyes would close in an ecstasy of concentration. The twins stared, and at intervals were constrained to swallow.
"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin, helpless in the sight of so fierce a joy. His brother descended briskly from the fence.
"I bet that's good," he said, genially, and taking the half-filled pail from his brother's unresisting grasp he approached the newcomer. "Try some of these nice ripe blackberries," he royally urged.
"Thanks a lot!" said the girl, and did so. But the hospitality remained one-sided.
"I have to keep up my strength," she explained. "I have a long, hard journey before me. I'm running away."
Blackberry juice now stained her chin, enriching a colour scheme already made notable by dye from the candy.
"Running away!" echoed the twins. This, also, was sane.
"Where to?" demanded Wilbur.
"Far, far off to the great city with all its pitfalls."
"New York?" demanded Merle. "What's a pitfall?"
"The way Ben Blunt did when his cruel stepmother beat him because he wouldn't steal and bring it home."
"Ben Blunt?" questioned both twins.
"That's whom I am going to be. That's whom I am now—or just as soon as I change clothes with some unfortunate. It's in a book. 'Ben Blunt, the Newsboy; or, From Rags to Riches.' He run off because his cruel stepmother beat him black and blue, and he become a mere street urchin, though his father, Mr. Blunt, was a gentleman in good circumstances; and while he was a mere street urchin he sold papers and blacked boots, and he was an honest, manly lad and become adopted by a kind, rich old gentleman named Mr. Pettigrew, that he saved from a gang of rowdies that boded him no good, and was taken to his palatial mansion and given a kind home and a new suit of clothes and a good Christian education, and that's how he got from rags to riches. And I'm going to be it; I'm going to be a mere street urchin and do everything he did."
"Ho!" The Wilbur twin was brutal. "You're nothing but a girl!"
The runaway flashed him a hostile glance.
"Don't be silly! What difference does it make? Haven't I a cruel stepmother that is constantly making scenes if I do the least little thing, especially since Miss Murtree went home because her mother has typhoid in Buffalo. You wait till I get the right clothes."
"Does she beat you something awful?" demanded the Merle twin unctuously.
The victim hesitated.
"Well, you might call it that."
"What kind of right clothes?" asked his brother.
"Boy's clothes; filthy rags of boy's clothes—like yours," she concluded. Her appraising glance rested on the garments of the questioning twin. Both became conscious of their mean attire, and squirmed uneasily.
"These are just everyday clothes," muttered the Wilbur twin.
"We have fine new Sunday suits at home," boasted Merle. "Too fine to wear every day. If you saw those clothes once I guess you'd talk different. Shoes and stockings, too."
The girl effaced his grandeur with a shrug.
"That's nothing—everyone has mere Sunday clothes."
"Is Miss Murtree that old lady that brings you to the Sunday-school?" demanded Wilbur.
"Yes; she's my governess, and had to go to her dying mother, and I hope she gets a cruel stepmother that will be harsh to her childish sports, like that Mrs. Blunt was. But she isn't old. It's her beard makes her look so mature."
"Aw!" cried both twins, denoting incredulity.
"She has, too, a beard! A little moustache and some growing on her chin. When I first got 'Ben Blunt, or from Rags to Riches,' out of the Sunday-school library I asked her how she made it grow, because I wanted one to grow on me, but she made a scene and never did tell me. I wish it would come out on me that way." She ran questing fingers along her brief upper lip and round her pointed chin. "But prob'ly I ain't old enough."
"You're only a girl," declared the Wilbur twin, "and you won't ever have a beard, and you couldn't be Ben Blunt."
"Only a girl!" she flashed, momentarily stung into a defense of her sex. "Huh! I guess I'd rather be a girl than a nasty little boy with his hands simply covered with warts."
The shamed hands of Wilbur Cowan sought the depths of his pockets, but he came up from the blow.
"Yes, you'd rather be a girl!" he retorted, with ponderous irony. "It's a good thing you wasn't born in China. Do you know what? If you'd been born in China, when they seen what it was they'd simply have chucked you into the river to drown'd."
"The idea! They would not!"
"Ho! You're so smart! I guess you think you know more than that missionary that told us so at the meeting. I guess you think he was telling lies. They'd have drownded you as soon as they seen it was a girl. But boys they keep."
"I
