girls in order that they might be nice to her; she strove, instead, and with marked success, to show all little girls that she did not like or heed or want them.

The vivid hair, flaming about her small truculent face, was a red flag of defiance to all other children.

[16]

CHAPTER II Mrs. Darrow seeks further for gentility, and her daughter has her hair pulled and doesn’t mind it.

EFFIE DARROW died when Glen was twelve years old, quite suddenly and excitingly after long and uneventful years of invalidism.

She became, so patently that even the child could sense, if she could not understand it, a person of importance once more in the eyes of her husband. For seven tense and high-keyed days and nights she interested him intensely, though he had never expected her to interest him again. If he could not summon a handsome grief at will, at least he could and did produce an earnest solicitude which satisfied her amply as long as she was conscious.

His eyes blurred for an instant when he heard the dismal dropping of clay upon the coffin, but they brightened again at the thought that his child was now his indeed.

Driving back from the cemetery in a soft, warm rain, he fired his first gun. “Glen, how’d you like to leave Miss Josephine’s and go to public school?”

[17]“I don’t care,” the girl answered, heavy-eyed.

[17]

“All right, then—tell her you’re quitting. Suits me fine. Never did like that namby-pamby, cambric tea outfit up there!” He scowled savagely. “Go where you’re good as any and better than most—and they know it,—that’s my idea!”

“I don’t care,” said the child again, her voice sodden with grief.

She started in at public school the following Monday morning, but she did not react to it with especial pleasure, so far as her disappointed father could see. She grew normally cheerful again, however. It was a fact that once her sound young nerves had recovered from the shock of death and burial, life in the ugly house went on more briskly and comfortably without Effie’s pathetic presence. Yellow Emma-leen stayed on, having an even freer hand, carrying a brazen basket home every night, and the doctor and his daughter were well fed, if slackly swept and dusted.

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