BY JOSLYN GRAY

BOUNCING BET

THE JANUARY GIRL

ROSEMARY GREENAWAY

RUSTY MILLER

ELSIE MARLEY, HONEY

KATHLEEN’S PROBATION

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

BOUNCING BET

“I shall have to ask you five dollars, which is half the customary fee”

[Page [112]

BOUNCING BET

BY
JOSLYN GRAY

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921

Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1918, by Perry, Mason & Co.

To
NELL
SINGER OF
SWEET, OLD SONGS
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY HER SISTER

ILLUSTRATIONS

BOUNCING BET

CHAPTER I

“P ’R’APS I ought to be going,” remarked Tommy suddenly, à propos of nothing.

“Going! Why, you just came!” exclaimed his host.

“But I was here yesterday, and——”

“Do you mean you want to get off—you have something on hand?” Mr. Meadowcroft inquired.

Tommy grinned. “No, sir, nothin’ o’ that sort. I’m too comfortable.” He bounced up and down in the springy easy-chair as if to illustrate his words. “And, my goodness, I’d a heap drather be here than anywhere else. Only dad, you know—I was sort of experimenting on you—‘Sorry to have you go, but here’s your hat’—and all that, you know.”

“Don’t experiment any more, then, for it’s only a waste of time,” Mr. Meadowcroft rejoined kindly, his unusual voice and the courtesy of his manner making his words the more impressive to the country lad. “It’s mighty good of you to drop in on me as you do, and I hardly know how I should get along without you now. I certainly hope nothing will induce you to put that to an experiment.”

Humphrey Meadowcroft spoke with sincerity. Three months earlier, he had come to live with his sister in South Paulding, shortly after the death of her husband, and Tommy Finnemore had been his first caller and was now practically his only acquaintance among the village people. The boy came often, being, in spite of moments of diffidence, pretended or otherwise, well assured of a warm welcome; but Meadowcroft realized that his first call had meant real initiative and a special effort as well as generous friendliness; for the big, handsome house which stood on the village street with gardens behind had no reputation for hospitality. Mrs. Phillips had lived here in her husband’s old home for more than a dozen years, but in all that time she had had nothing to do with the people or the life of the village.

The boy, who was exceedingly lank and awkward, though in rather picturesque fashion, colored so deeply that his many and conspicuous freckles merged and were lost in the flush that extended to the roots of his ragged fringe of sandy-brown hair. His eyes fell upon his long, lean fingers, which looked grimy, indeed, though not because he had just come from school. They were badly stained with acids of various sorts and dates.

“Well, you see you’re interested in my magic; you really seem to like to hear about it,” he returned ingenuously. “You never change the subject, and you let me tell all about the beginning of a trick even if it doesn’t have any end, you know. Hardly anybody else I know really and truly cares. Nobody does except Bouncing Bet.”

“Ah, then it’s a sort of utilitarian regard you have for your friends, Tommy Finnemore?”

Tommy wasn’t given to blushing, but he colored again.

“O, I should like to come anyhow,” he declared. “I like your talk just as much as you like my magic—I mean, of course, I like it a lot better. There’s more to it. And I—goodness, but I’m mighty glad to be back here after being down in Jersey. Everybody there seemed so noisy and so—so confounded healthy.”

Meadowcroft laughed as he caught the implication. His left leg and arm were paralyzed, the arm being shrunken also, and he spent the greater part of his time in a large padded wheel-chair. A pair of crutches stood in a corner. Tommy had never seen Mr. Meadowcroft resort to them, though it was said that he took daily exercise in a part of the garden which had been enclosed by high brick walls since he had come to South Paulding.

“That’s rather a left-hander, but it comes from the right spot, Tommy!” Meadowcroft said. And Tommy decided to try another chair. The room was very large, with chairs and sofas and couches galore, and Mr. Meadowcroft never minded his progress from one to another. For himself, he always sat by one of the side windows, in a position where he could also see all that passed in the street below the front windows. He had a handsome, refined, rather worn face, smooth-shaven, with brilliant gray eyes and thick dark hair lightly sprinkled with gray. His dress and manner were more elegant than anything Tommy or, in fact, South Paulding had ever known before. Mr. Phillips had been a man of wealth but plain and brusque, and might have been taken at any time for one of the operatives of his factory at Paulding.

As Tommy vainly strove to amend his statement so that it would indicate that he liked Mr. Meadowcroft even better and admired him exactly as much as if he had the full use of both hands and feet, it came to him that his other friend would have expressed the meaning without awkwardness.

“Now, Bouncing Bet”—he began, but stopped short, partly because he hardly knew what he was about to say, but rather because Mr. Meadowcroft suddenly bent his brows and fixed his eyes sharply upon him.

“What is that you call your other fidus Achates?” he demanded.

“Bouncing Bet,” rejoined Tommy glibly, and looked for the smile that usually followed the use of that appellation. But he failed to see any evidence of humorous appreciation.

The village of South Paulding consisted practically of one long street which was really a beautiful avenue. The Phillips house stood about half-way between the limits, the greater number of dwelling-houses being above, towards Paulding, and the group of shops, the post office and grammar and primary schools below. Meadowcroft, who had never lived in the country before, enjoyed watching the straggling procession that passed the window almost continuously from morning until night. And he particularly enjoyed the school children who went back and forth with a certain regularity twice daily.

“I suppose, Tommy, you mean the big girl I see going to school with the little ones?” he asked quietly.

Tommy nodded. “They’re not so little, you know, Mr. Meadowcroft, those girls she walks with. It’s only that they look little ’side o’ her,” he explained. “Why, even I would look small myself—I mean sort of—if I was to walk with her, even if I stood up straight, which I don’t always.”

He sat suddenly erect, but humped down again almost immediately.

“Poor thing! Is she a bit stupid, Tommy, or is it worse than that?” Meadowcroft asked. In his pity, he had averted his eyes when the girl passed as he would have refrained from looking at a cripple.

“Stupid!” cried Tommy. “Gee! Bouncing Bet stupid! Why, she’s the best scholar in my class—the very best.” He paused, then added loftily: “She takes a really intelligent interest in my magic. There’s no fooling her like you can the fellows—sometimes. She ain’t like some girls that say they like it to be polite and wouldn’t look on while I do one trick for fear they’d be blown up or lose their eyebrows.”

“But why is she so backward?” queried Meadowcroft in genuine surprise. “Surely, she ought to be going over to Paulding to the high school at her age.”

“O, she ain’t old. She’s just big of her age, you know, Mr. Meadowcroft,” rejoined the boy. “She ain’t so old as me and most of the others. She’s just—well, big. That’s why they call her Bouncing Bet, you see.”

“Well, I’m surprised; I confess that I am amazed!” exclaimed Meadowcroft. He hadn’t looked at the girl; but a glance told one that she would have been tall for a girl of sixteen, and large for any age whatever. Her nickname seemed to suggest a sort of jovial coarseness, but he had particular sympathy for anyone who was physically conspicuous.

“And she doesn’t mind being called—Bouncing Bet?” he asked, with reluctance to repeat the phrase.

“O no, sir,” replied Tommy promptly, “you see her name’s Betty—or really Betsey. Her father sometimes calls her Betsey. And she’s used to it, for she’s always been big, and everybody calls her Bouncing Bet—not exactly right out to her face, you know, and yet not behind her back.”

“Perhaps she’s rather proud of her size?” suggested Meadowcroft, rather hoping that such was the case.

“Proud of it! O gee! she just hates it. Why, she just—just—abominates and despises being so big!” cried Tommy, reaching for the piano stool in his excitement and twirling it madly. Then remembering how that action annoyed his mother, he removed the temptation by changing his seat again.

“You see she never has any fun at all, and never has had except what she gets out of my magic,” he added.

“If she hates being big, Tommy, believe me she minds that nickname,” Meadowcroft declared with unusual emphasis. “When I was at boarding-school I learned by chance that the other boys referred to me as Hoplite Meadowcroft. You won’t get the full significance of that until you go to the high school and study Greek, but perhaps you may guess something of what I felt, for I should really hate to tell you how that nickname hurt me, or——” He paused. “I daresay hers hurts Miss Betty more,” he added.

Tommy’s eyes fell on his spotted hands. “Fat’s—different,” he said in a low voice.

“And so are girls. They take things harder than we men, Tommy,” returned the other so earnestly that Tommy winked fast and got into another chair.

He was silent for a little, then began to speak of a trick in magic he was eager to perform, which involved as a beginning getting the bottom out of a glass bottle.

“All you have to do, the book says, is to give the bottle a smart, deft rap with a hammer or any bit of steel, but I don’t seem to get the combination,” he observed. “The bottom busts up first thing with me every time. I’ve used up all the bottles I can find, and dad watches me like he was a policeman if I go near the shed, and ma just the same with the medicine cupboard and the kitchen sink, and I haven’t got one yet to begin on. And how are you going to do the trick, I’d like to know, if you can’t begin?”

Meadowcroft proposed to consult Herbie, the man who had lived with him for years and who now acted also as butler for his sister, with regard to a fresh supply of bottles. Tommy was properly gratified, but as the clock struck and he picked up his wad of a cap preparatory to leaving, he remarked in an offhand manner:

“I guess after all I won’t call her that any more. She’s mighty decent, you know,—no nonsense about her, and I’d sooner tell her things and have her watch me do magic than any fellow I know. She’s really my best friend, though you never see me walking by with her as probably you see me sometimes walking with other girls in my class. One reason why is she walks so slow I can’t keep up with her,—no, down, I mean. But that ain’t the real reason. She’s a head taller ’n me, and I’m not so small, either, ’bout the average for my age. And a fellow feels funny, you know, as if he was walking with his aunty. She’s taller ’n any boy in school and way up above Miss Sherman, the teacher.”

“You’ll overtake her in time, Tommy, if you give yourself a fair chance,” remarked Meadowcroft kindly. “You must remember, however, not to shut yourself up so closely with your magic as not to get enough fresh air and exercise to add the proper number of inches to your height each year.”

“Not much danger of that,” grumbled the lad. “Every single time I set things afire—even the leastest mite—or forget to take off my good clothes and get holes in ’em or borrow things like felt table covers and get spots on ’em, mother tells dad on me, and he says I ain’t to do any magic or even open a book on magic for a week or sometimes two. Those times I play ball. And they come often, I can tell you.”

He sighed, then raised himself from his usual lounging stoop to his full height, which was surely not a fraction above the average for his years.

“I’m goin’ on fourteen, but I ain’t nearly got my growth yet,” he declared stoutly. “And there’s a lot of hope. But you see it’s different with Betty. She can’t grow down. She’s more’n big enough now for a grown woman. And she just has to act like one—to go around and visit older people and pug her hair, and wear long dresses and walk slow. Of course she has to. It’s too bad, but—well, you ought to see one of my cousins in Jersey. She ain’t so tall, but she’s about as fat as Betty, and she wears her hair flying and runs and races and shouts and dresses in sailor-suits just like other girls. I don’t think it’s nice, do you, when she’s so big? Sometimes she just shrieks.”

“Which of the two girls enjoys life more, Tommy, your friend or your cousin?”

Tommy opened his eyes wide. “O, Madge has a jolly time, of course, and Betty never has any fun, but—she doesn’t care for it. She’d drather—I mean, she’s used to it by this time. She’s always been too big to play ever since she was little. And—she gets considerable quiet enjoyment out of my magic.”

Meadowcroft smiled. Tommy grinned and reluctantly left the room. Sliding down the handsome solid railing of the staircase, he landed neatly on a rug and let himself out the screen door. At that moment he heard his name called, and stepping back saw Meadowcroft leaning over the balustrade with his crutches. He wished he might have seen how he got there. He had never dreamed he was so spry as all that!

“Tommy, I wish you would ask Miss Betty to come in to see me some day,” Meadowcroft called down—“some day soon, please.”

“Sure. That’s just her line. She’ll be pleased to accept,” Tommy called back cheerfully, and was off again, whistling gaily if not very tunefully as he strolled up the avenue towards home.

CHAPTER II

MRS. PHILLIPS had friends in Paulding and other towns nearby, and though she was in mourning and did not go out much, entertained constantly at home. But on this particular night she and her brother were alone at dinner, and he took occasion to ask her about the young girl in whom he already felt warm interest. For though Mrs. Phillips did not associate with the village people, she knew the history of everyone and was always informed as to what was going on about her.

“O—Bouncing Bet, you mean?” she exclaimed, and laughed in her pretty, artificial way. “I wonder, Humphrey, if you remember a story we read as children—at least, I did—called ‘The Baby Giant’?”

Meadowcroft did not recall it.

“Well, Bouncing Bet always makes me think of the pictures in that story—there’s one where he’s climbing over a wall, and is stuck, I believe—she’s just so big and lumbering, with just such a big baby face and placid sort of cow-like expression. Then there’s another where the baby giant is crying—such an absurd spectacle, his mouth puckered up, fists in his eyes, and baby tears rolling down the cheeks of a six- or eight- or I-don’t-know-how-many-footer. Well, when Bouncing Bet was ever so much younger, but big as a girl of twelve really, she used to cry if the children called her names; and, Humphrey, she was the baby giant over again. I just wish you could have seen her.”

Her brother didn’t echo her wish. He changed the subject rather abruptly. He didn’t like the idea of a woman recalling with unmixed amusement the picture of a big little girl crying because her feelings were hurt. And he felt the more concerned for the girl.

He watched for her rather eagerly next morning. Presently he caught sight of her coming towards the house, head and shoulders above her companion. She walked slowly, of a truth, as Tommy had said, and he had opportunity for a searching scrutiny.

Tall and very large, Meadowcroft saw that the girl was square and massive, so to speak, rather than fat. She was altogether too large—he couldn’t gainsay that—but she wasn’t shapeless or clumsy. With different clothing her figure wouldn’t, Meadowcroft decided, be bad; it would be rather like certain Greek statues, indeed, though her proportions probably exceeded the most ample of those marbles, and she was, perhaps, too big even for an Amazon.

But her style of dress was most unfortunate, as if it had been designed to call attention to her size. She wore a white blouse drawn in very tightly at the waist under a leather belt, bulging out below which a dark stuff skirt reached her ankles. Her hat was small and suited to an old lady, and her fair hair, which waved prettily about her ears, was drawn into a tight knob at her neck. And while the other school-girls wore attractive shoes with ribbon lacings, she wore ugly, pointed-toed, high-heeled boots which looked too tight and made her heavy step mincing at the same time.

Meadowcroft had not sufficient time to study her face to catch its expression—or, according to his sister, lack of expression. But he saw that though her face was large and square, it was not what is called plump. Rather, there was a flatness, a sort of Indian cast to her features. Her profile was good, with a clear-cut chin, and her color clear and fine. Perhaps, indeed, that sweet pink in her cheeks gave her a kindlier resemblance to the pretty posy whence her nickname had come than her size to its flaunting and rather inappropriate name.

Meantime, having passed the Phillips house, Betty Pogany turned and glanced shyly back. Tommy had left the kindlings he had been chopping and run down the lane on which his house stood to tell her that the lame gentleman at Mrs. Phillips’s wanted her to come to see him just as soon as she possibly could, and she felt pleased and rather excited. If only Aunt Sarah wouldn’t object too seriously. She would be sure to object and strenuously. Scarcely anyone in South Paulding liked Mrs. Phillips and Aunt Sarah couldn’t bear her, and if she had her way wouldn’t allow Betty to enter her house. But as the lady did a great deal of trading with Betty’s father, who was a hardware merchant, there was an even chance of her being allowed to accept the invitation given by Mrs. Phillips’s brother.

It proved more than even. Aunt Sarah, who was an extremely exacting woman and almost always had her way, told Betty that she certainly should not go a step, talked about Mrs. Phillips for a quarter of an hour, and upbraided the girl for wishing to enter the house of one who thought herself so much better than her neighbors. But that evening when she bade her brother forbid Betty to visit the mansion, George Pogany decided that if Mr. Meadowcroft wanted to see his daughter, she should go. She needn’t, however, let it interfere with her practising. She must wait until Saturday afternoon.

“Of course, father,” the girl assented seriously.

“But that doesn’t mean, I hope, that you’ll neglect Rosy, Betty?” he demanded. And Betty, who was highly elated, declared that she should of course go first to the Harrows’.

“Well, then, it’ll surely be a case of the lame, the halt, and the blind,” her father remarked facetiously.

“For my part, I don’t call a man that passes his days in a wheeled chair and rides out in a brougham lame. I should call him a cripple, just as everybody would if he didn’t live in the finest house in the country with that stuck-up Mrs. Phillips,” declared Miss Pogany severely.

Betty knew that it wasn’t a brougham but a victoria Mr. Meadowcroft drove in, and as Tommy had told her about the crutches, she believed the word lame admissible. But she said nothing. It was almost second nature to the girl to repress her thoughts and feelings. Perhaps it was long experience of repression that had molded her countenance to that impassive, Indian-like type which only Humphrey Meadowcroft had noticed.

But when she was alone in her room, as she undressed and prepared for bed, Betty Pogany sighed more than once, despite the fact that she had the coveted permission to call on the stranger whom Tommy found enchanting. It hurt her almost cruelly to have Aunt Sarah call him a cripple in that cold, scornful fashion. Furthermore, she knew that she had a number of very uncomfortable days before her. Had Betty’s father confirmed her decision, Aunt Sarah would have had nothing further to say. As it was, she would be very resentful; she would bring up the matter again and again and Betty would have no peace except while she was at school and during the evenings when her father wasn’t at the shop.

CHAPTER III

TOMMY FINNEMORE was seldom enthusiastic over anything except magic. Everyone in the village liked the odd, lazy, careless lad; but though he cherished no dislike for anyone, nearly everybody bored him, his schoolmates as well as older people, and especially his parents. Wherefore when he spoke in glowing terms of the stranger in the Phillips house, it meant much to one who knew Tommy as Betty Pogany knew him, and who regarded him not only as a scientific experimenter and observer but also as something of a philosopher. And Tommy took occasion to mention Mr. Meadowcroft every time he saw Betty. He wished her to appreciate the value of her invitation and did not mind if she realized that it came through him. And if she guessed that it was in a sense a reward for her devotion to his magic, so much the better.

Accordingly, when Saturday arrived, Betty was in a state of unusual excitement, though none would have guessed it from her appearance. Perhaps it was better so. For it was childish excitement, and perhaps childish emotion in a great girl like Betty would have made her the Baby Giant Mrs. Phillips saw in her. However, it would have been far more difficult for the girl to express her emotion than to hide it.

It was also characteristic of her that though she was all eagerness to present herself at the Phillips house, she went first for her wonted dreary, weekly visit to a friend and former schoolmate who had been left blind six months earlier after a severe attack of scarlet fever. Moreover, Betty went to the Harrows’ cottage first, not because she wished to have the visit over and out of the way, but because she wanted to make sure of that whatever happened.

Betty lived in a large comfortable house on the main street not far from where it became the highway leading to Paulding. Tommy lived in a lane which branched off one-eighth of a mile nearer the post office, and Rose Harrow in a street meeting the avenue on the opposite side just above the Phillips estate. Mr. Harrow was a carpenter and had built the cottage, which had many gables and porches and a great deal of ornamentation which Aunt Sarah referred to as “gingerbread.” Betty went round to a side porch which looked like a little pagoda, and knocked. Mrs. Harrow came to the door.

Mrs. Harrow had changed greatly since her daughter’s tragic misfortune. Formerly a pretty, cheerful, youthful-appearing woman, she had grown thin and worn, and bluish shadows under her large dark eyes made them look as over-large as they were solemn. She always seemed on the verge of bursting into tears, and always whispered at the door as if someone within were desperately ill.

“Rosy didn’t sleep very well last night, Betty; she tossed and turned,” she whispered warningly; “so you’d better only stay half an hour to-day. And do be very careful about mentioning anything that might excite her. I couldn’t think of letting anyone else come in, but you are so mature that I can trust you. Being such a great girl, I almost forget you aren’t a woman.”

Betty’s face didn’t express how she hated being whispered to. She promised solemnly to be careful, though she wondered what she should talk about. She was never allowed to mention school, for that would make Rose feel very badly, nor to have anything to say about the other girls or flowers or colors or games. There wasn’t much left to talk about except Tommy’s magic, and probably Mrs. Harrow would think that exciting. She could read aloud, but Rose’s mother did that by the hour and another voice wouldn’t make much difference.

She stifled a sigh as Mrs. Harrow ushered her into the familiar sitting-room, silently and solemnly as one leads a visitor into a sick-chamber. Rose sat in a big, soft chair, leaning back listlessly against the cushions. Exceedingly pretty and vivacious before her illness, the girl was thin to emaciation now, shockingly pale and forlornly apathetic. Her big, dark, mournful-looking eyes gave no indication that they were sightless except that they stared straight before her; the enlarged pupils only made them seem darker and more brilliant. Her abundant dark crinkly hair, which she had worn parted at the side with piquant effect and adorned with huge, bright-colored bows, was strained unbecomingly back from her brow, braided tightly, and tied at the end with a bit of string. She wore a shapeless dressing-gown and ugly slippers.

She had been the liveliest, the best dressed, and one of the prettiest girls in the grammar school; and the change struck Betty anew each week, though she had seen Rose every Saturday since the first of April. She could scarcely control her voice, but Mrs. Harrow’s warning presence aided her. After some rather forced talk about a nest the robins were building in the portico over her front door, which she had described at some length a week earlier, she came to a halt. In a sort of desperation, she proposed that they should sit out in the piazza for a little.

“It’s very mild out, Mrs. Harrow,” she added in her mature way.

“Yes, I know, but her papa’s going to take her out in the buggy when he comes home, and I don’t know’s she’d better be out now, Betty. What do you think, Rosy?” her mother inquired anxiously.

“I don’t care,” said Rose languidly.

“Then you may as well stay right here, for the windows are open,” Mrs. Harrow decided with evident relief. “I’ll change you into the rocking-chair so’s you’ll get more breeze.” And she led the girl very gently and carefully to a seat nearer the window and established her in it with an excessive amount of fussing. Then, deciding to take advantage of Betty’s presence to finish some work in the kitchen, she left the room with a farewell glance of warning to the girl.

Conversation limped along a little and then halted. It occurred to Betty to propose to sing. Rose was very fond of music, and assented with rather less than her wonted indifference; and taking her place at the pianoforte, Betty sang all the cheerful songs she could think of. Just as she was obliged to resort to hymns, Mrs. Harrow returned. Though the effect of the music appeared to be soothing, she watched her daughter anxiously and presently began making signs at Betty and pointing to the clock. With some hesitation, Betty finished a stanza, then went to her friend and took her hand.

“I guess I’d better be going now, Rose dear,” she said gently; and as Rose clung to her, bent and kissed her. On a sudden the blind girl burst into tears, and Mrs. Harrow hurried Betty off with scant ceremony.

“I suppose it was the music,” said Betty sorrowfully to herself as she went along. “Dear me, I begin to dread next Saturday already. I don’t know what I can do or say. O, and now, here’s this lame gentleman. I must be careful with him, too. I mustn’t speak of legs or arms or mention any sort of sports. Well! at least I can talk about sunsets and how things look, and school, if he should be interested. And—here I am already, and—I hope Mrs. Phillips isn’t at home.”

CHAPTER IV

THE man who opened the door was so fine and imposing that Betty would have taken him for Mr. Meadowcroft if she hadn’t known of the latter’s infirmity. She asked for him in her polite, old-womanly fashion and was told to go right up. But as she would have started, she saw Mrs. Phillips, dressed for the carriage, about to descend the grand stairway. Betty stifled a sigh, but she waited dutifully and greeted the lady with sweet formality.

“Who’s this! Not Bouncing Bet, surely!” cried Mrs. Phillips effusively. “Dear me, how you do grow! You’re as tall as I, and you’d make three of me, if not four. My goodness! how do you buy your belts—by the yard? And how old are you, pray?”

“Thirteen in July,” said the girl reluctantly, as if confessing a fault. But Mrs. Phillips was not waiting for a reply.

“Did you want to see me?” she asked rather rudely, “because, as you can see, I am on my way out.”

“I came to see Mr. Meadowcroft,” said Betty quietly.

“O, I’m sorry, but you see it’s really shockingly early,” Mrs. Phillips began. But the man at the door, though he didn’t interrupt, took advantage of her pause to say: “Mr. Meadowcroft said as how the young lady was to come right up, ma’am, as he’s expecting her.”

Mrs. Phillips shrugged her shoulders and went on without a word. She had never understood her brother’s vagaries and now he seemed “queerer” than ever to her. But she liked having him in the house, not only because he was so distinguished and elegant both in manner and appearance, but because he was a wonderful companion. And though she would have liked to manage his personal affairs as she had managed her husband’s, and those of everyone else within her sphere, she realized that she couldn’t keep him with her if she made any such attempt.

As Betty climbed the stair, it came to her that it would be a pleasanter world if people would choose their words in speaking to overgrown girls—to fat people, in short—just as they did for the lame and blind. It wasn’t, of course, the same, but it seemed sometimes as bad as a real affliction.

The door of the room the man had indicated stood open. As she knocked on the lintel, the girl drew her breath sharply. Aunt Sarah’s word “cripple” came up before her, making her forget all Tommy’s enthusiastic praise, and she shrank momentarily from what was before her. But bidden to enter, she complied without an instant’s delay, and went straight to the wheel-chair.

At first sight, however, Mr. Meadowcroft was so impressive and so charming that she couldn’t help feeling conscience-stricken for her moment of hesitation.

“Pardon my not rising, and pray make yourself comfortable, Miss Pogany,” he said in the pleasantest voice Betty had ever heard. “I am sorry I can’t tell you which chair is most comfortable, for Tommy Finnemore changes from one to another so frequently that I sometimes suspect they’re all like dentists’ chairs. However, that blue one doesn’t look so bad. You might try that.”

The blue chair was truly very comfortable. Moreover, it was small. Anyone else would have pointed out the largest in the room; and Betty sank into it gratefully.

“It’s right good of you to give me a part of your holiday, Miss Pogany,” the gentleman remarked, glancing kindly upon her.

Already Meadowcroft saw that the girl’s countenance, which upon closer view resembled yet more nearly the facial type of the American Indian, was redeemed from its potential Indian impassiveness or even stolidity by her soft-brown eyes, which were gentle and lovely of expression and full of keen intelligence. Mrs. Phillips’s voice was high and thin and very penetrating, and her brother had been exceedingly annoyed to hear her greet his guest as Bouncing Bet. Now he said to himself that Black-eyed Susan would be a more fitting nickname. But he didn’t dwell upon the comparison, for it came to him that that wild flower is also called ox-eyed daisy, and that reminded him of his sister’s epithet “cow-like.”

“I was very glad to come, sir,” replied the girl politely. “I visit—the sick considerably, you know.”

“But bless you, child, I’m not sick,” he retorted, smiling. “I stay in this contraption much of the time, it is true, and one arm and leg aren’t of much service to me; but for all that——”

Pausing, he looked at her searching but very kindly. And though she was sensitive and his gaze held steadily for half a minute, Betty Pogany didn’t mind it. It seemed, indeed, rather like standing in a bar of sunlight on a chill day. For somehow, she didn’t feel that he was thinking how big she was—what a bouncing girl for under thirteen years. He seemed to be looking at the real Betty who wasn’t fat or—anything—who was just herself, a human being like others.

And as he went on, his words seemed an echo of her sensation.

“At any rate, I didn’t ask you to come in to see me as an invalid or anything of the sort, but just as a fellow human being,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I had a rather definite purpose in mind, and I don’t feel that I need to fuss and bother about leading up to it and all that, Miss Betty. I think I can get right at it at once. May I begin instanter by telling you something about a boy I knew? You’ll get the bearing.”

Betty’s eyes assented warmly though her face was as expressionless as her polite affirmation. Meadowcroft wheeled his chair about and adjusted it at a better angle. And the girl, whose part in life had been largely that of a spectator, observed the beauty of the long, slender right hand with a curious cameo on the third finger.

“The boy I speak of was lame—deformed might perhaps be a better word, though it’s rather ugly,” he began. “His parents had money—fortunately, most people would say. In any event, he was unfortunate in that they had a lot too much. They lavished it upon all sorts of specialists in surgery in the effort to have him become like other boys. Then when they found that to be quite impossible, they used the money as a barrier between him and his fellows. They padded a prison with it in which they confined him. He was shut off from the society of other boys, from the sight and so far as possible from the knowledge of boyish sports and pursuits. They kept him in ignorance, so far as was possible, of the universe as a boy knows it. I don’t think he had a genuine boy’s book until he went to boarding-school as an old man of sixteen. He had servants and tutors and drove and traveled and all that, and for years believed himself well off and a person of consequence. Then, somehow, though only when it was too late, he began to feel that something was wrong. He didn’t know what it was; but he begged to be allowed to go away to school. He felt that there he might come to know what it was that was awry. At first his parents wouldn’t hear of it; but finally they succumbed to his pleading, and a year before he was to be ready for college, he was sent to the best boarding-school they could select. He was permitted to have a man-servant, and his parents paid the expenses of another boy who served as a sort of fag. He was full of enthusiasm at first, but it didn’t last. For he didn’t fit in at all. He couldn’t get near the other lads and they couldn’t get near him, though they were well-disposed and did their level best to pretend to let him into things. He couldn’t even make an acquaintance of the boy who helped him; and he was lonelier than ever, and actually unhappy, where he had been only vaguely ill at ease before. And then presently the explanation came to him. He picked up a book belonging to the underclass boy who waited on him, and—do you understand Latin, Miss Betty?”

The girl started violently. She had been utterly lost in the narration, her dark eyes far away, her face dumbly appreciative.

“No, sir; but I am to begin it in September when I go over to the high school,” she replied in her prim, demure way.

“Well anyhow, I probably shouldn’t quote correctly from memory. The passage was rather impressively put and was to the effect that, as a boy, Marcus Livius Drusus had no holidays,—that is, he never had a chance to play, to get out with the boys, to have a jolly time. Well, it came to me that this Roman worthy and I were in the same class. Alike, we had been defrauded of a precious, yes, an inalienable right. You know, it’s not only the fun one loses, Miss Betty; it’s the association with one’s kind, one’s peers, the give and take, the rubbing up against the sharp corners of other fellows’ personalities, the gradual learning one’s proper place in the world, the sharpening of wits as well as quickening of understanding sympathy, the glimpses of homely, sturdy, hidden virtues and the reaching out for them unawares.”

Humphrey Meadowcroft paused, and drew his hand across his brow. He had suddenly grown white; lines showed in his forehead that Betty, close observer as experience had made her, hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to the girl that he had actually grown older since she had entered the room. As a matter of fact, the man had never before said so much as this of his thwarted youth to anyone.

He did not feel that he could go further; but he realized that he had no need so to do. For the girl understood. Her eyes were downcast; her face was almost stolidly inexpressive despite the sweetness of her mouth; nevertheless Meadowcroft was aware that she understood with the sympathetic understanding that is theirs who have themselves suffered hurt and pain.

Still, she did not make the desired application. She was only sorry for the boy.

“Well, Miss Betty?” he said after some moments. His smile, infrequent but rarely attractive, banished the lines of care. And now he looked, as usual, younger than his years, which were four times hers.

Her brown eyes, full of wonder, met his brilliant gray eyes.

“I can’t help feeling, somehow, that you are in the same boat with the boy that was I, and so I want to warn you—back to land while there’s yet time,” he observed half lightly. “For in your case I am happy to feel that it isn’t too late. It isn’t nearly too late. But there’s the chance that it may be so before you realize it. This is how the situation looks to me. Because you are, and perhaps always have been, large for your age, you have never gone in for the things other children take up naturally all along the path of the years. You’re grown up now when you ought to be a little girl—a romping little girl!”

She looked at him so understandingly, so ruefully, so deprecatingly, and she was so big, so truly bouncing, that Meadowcroft couldn’t himself help thinking of the baby giant. But his heart went out to her only the more warmly.

“Tell me. How long is it since you have left off playing—running and romping and all that?” he demanded. “How long have you been as grown-up as you are now?”

She smiled wanly. “O, almost always, it seems, sir,” she declared. “I have worn long dresses—almost long—for years, and of course you can’t do much with long skirts. And then I always looked so queer, even in games like Green Gravel and On the Green Carpet that I—hardly ever played. And—they’ve called me Bouncing Bet ever since before I was six.”

Betty Pogany’s self-control was really exceptional for her years. But the girl had never before known real, understanding sympathy. On a sudden her eyes filled with tears which overflowed upon her fair pink cheeks. Once more, as she reached for her pocket handkerchief, Meadowcroft saw Isabel Phillips’s picture of the baby giant in tears. But the girl controlled herself almost at once and tried to smile.

“I pretended—after a little—I guess when I was about eight—that I didn’t care, and I kept on pretending,” she owned, finding it curiously easy as she went on to speak after her years of reserve. “But I did care—I cared so that it seemed almost to kill me, and—I care now. And even now, I’d just love to play tag and Puss-in-the-Corner and the very babiest games. And sometimes I just hate to be at the head of my class, and I’d like to waste time in school instead of always studying, and even to be real bad, just to see how it would feel. But you can’t, of course, when you’re bigger than everyone in school, even the teacher. I never was even spoken to in school in all my life, but sometimes I dream I am. I dream that Miss Sherman says: ‘Why, Betty Pogany, a great big girl like you!’ And the boys all grinning and everybody in school looking at me!”

As she glanced up, Meadowcroft smiled kindly. The girl smiled frankly, too. Apparently she didn’t lack a sense of humor.

“You don’t admire compulsory virtue, I take it?” he queried.

She smiled ruefully.

“That’s a good name for it,” she observed. “Rose Harrow spoke a piece once in the intermediate school that was just like that and like me. It began—

‘I don’t know how it came about

I put my sacque on wrong-side-out,

I didn’t take it off all day,

Because ’twould drive my luck away.’

And it goes on to tell how they all made fun of her, but she sat still and learned her lessons with a will. And at the end she got the prize.”

“I see. But that was only for one day, and you have gone on all your life sitting still and learning your lessons with a will, as it were,” he returned. “Well, you’re mighty lucky that it isn’t too late to change. You can turn your jacket right side out at once and start out to-morrow morning doing exactly what other girls of twelve do.”

Betty Pogany gasped. “But—O, how could I?” she cried.

“O, just resume—begin, I should say,” he returned coolly.

“But even if I knew how, I couldn’t, honestly, Mr. Meadowcroft,” she declared mournfully. “The other girls are all—well, sort of paired off by now, and I always only watch. And I can’t walk fast and they wouldn’t want me tagging on. And I can’t act bad in school time, because always being so good. Miss Sherman would think I was terrible. And I might be expelled. And even if I didn’t want to go to the high school, there’s father,—and O. Aunt Sarah!”

“Well, you needn’t be a naughty girl. Just a natural, lively girl that has a jolly time every day is what I want you to turn into.”

Betty glanced helplessly at her tight boots. Meadowcroft looked hard at her.

“Suppose you begin by letting down your hair,” he suggested. “Wear it in a tail or in curls, you know, and cut off a number of inches from your skirts. Then get some low-heeled, round-toed, comfortable shoes and—for heaven’s sake take off that horribly tight belt and never put it on again. Isn’t there some sort of gown you can wear that doesn’t have to be spliced that way?” On a sudden he remembered Tommy’s cousin in Jersey. “Couldn’t you get a sailor-suit?” he suggested.

“A Peter Thompson?” cried the girl with shining eyes. “O, how I should love one! But—could I, do you think? Wouldn’t it look—silly?”

“Indeed no, nothing of the sort,” he asseverated. “It would look first-rate. It would not only be pretty and appropriate, but I don’t see how it could help being a lot more comfortable than your present costume. With a sailor-suit and easy shoes, I’ll wager that you can keep up with any of your friends.”

Her eyes shone. She drew a deep breath. Then her eyes fell, and when she raised them, they were clouded.

“O, but you don’t understand. I’m so—sort of stiff and settled,” she almost wailed.

“But just wait until you see how much of the stiffness will disappear with the tight, elderly clothing,” he bade her. “Leave off everything that isn’t perfectly comfortable. Get into a sailor-suit as soon as ever you can and then—just throw yourself into things. Go in for whatever’s going on.”

The girl pondered silently, but her eyes were full of wistful excitement.

“Here’s something in your favor. Tommy says you have only a fortnight more of school,” he reminded her. “Begin right away, anyhow, but the summer holidays will give you a capital chance to get wholly limbered up before you enter the high school. And there you can make a perfectly fresh start. Paulding’s a large town. The school will therefore be large, and your class may be three-quarters strangers. It will be easy to start in with them as a girl among girls and boys. Don’t think of your size. Just go in for everything as if you’d always been in the habit of doing so. You’re not stiff in your mind, you know, Miss Betty. You’re supple enough mentally to carry it all off if you can begin as a more flexible being physically. You can, as I said, limber up during the summer, and then—by the way, how do the South Paulding pupils go back and forth?”

Betty explained that they used the railway, leaving on the eight-thirty train in the morning and returning at three.

“And what’s the distance by the highway?” he inquired.

“Two miles and a half each way.”

“It would be unusual, not to say uncanny, if either way were longer? Well, that is just what they would call in London a tidy walk. Now if I were you. Miss Betty Pogany, I should get into practise during the holidays and then walk back and forth every trip all the autumn and winter and spring.”

The girl stared at him in amazement. She had never heard of anyone walking to Paulding. “Five miles a day!” she exclaimed.

“Certainly. That’s the least any healthy person ought to do,” he said firmly. “Are you game?”

Whereupon Betty Pogany proved that he was right as to her mental suppleness.

“Yes, sir, I’m game,” she said seriously.

“And you will—go in for it all?” he cried in genuine excitement.

“Yes, sir, all,” she declared demurely.

CHAPTER V

AS Betty Pogany left the Phillips house, unconsciously she walked faster than she ever walked unless Aunt Sarah had kept her and she was in danger of being late for school. In that case, she teetered along in rather absurd fashion; but to-day excitement lent her wings that seemed to lift the weight from the high-heeled boots. She passed the lane where the Finnemores lived without halting, though she felt a bit troubled in that, with an hour to spare before tea-time, she did not stop to see how Tommy’s magic might be progressing. Arriving home, she shut herself in her own chamber: and after tea, as soon as she had washed up, she fled to the same refuge. She took some stockings with her, and she mended them. But she walked so little that there were few stitches to be made with darning cotton, and she had all the time she needed for finer stitches with sewing silk.

Breakfast was an hour later on Sunday mornings, but Betty rose at the usual week-day hour. She had waked with a thrill of expectancy that reminded her of Christmas mornings when she was very small and her mother was alive. In spite of the change that the morning was to institute, she dressed more quickly than ever. And when she was ready to go down to help Aunt Sarah with the breakfast, the sense of freedom Mr. Meadowcroft had predicted was already sufficient to induce her to do unconsciously something she hadn’t done in years. She ran downstairs.

Betty had been well instructed in sewing as in all domestic and sedentary matters, and she was very clever with her needle. She had cut off her long skirt and hemmed it neatly and it was now well above the tops of her boots. She had also had to let it out several inches at the waist, for she had discarded the stays which her aunt had compelled her to adopt two years before. Neither would the leather belt meet under the new conditions, and she substituted a soft silk sash she had worn as a child, tying it in a graceful knot at the side. She couldn’t determine in the small mirror above her dresser how different her figure looked already. Naturally square and solid rather than fat, the new, almost straight lines it took were a vast improvement over the forced and ugly curves which the stays had induced. But she felt the freedom, and she noticed the difference when she arranged her hair. It was fair and abundant and ready to curl. She parted it and, drawing it back less rigidly than commonly, braided it, and tied the end with a ribbon that was another treasure saved from childhood. The girl never consulted a mirror except to see if she were tidy, and she couldn’t remember facing one with any sensation other than chagrin or at least indifference. Now, she hardly understood the thrill she felt as she looked wonderingly at the reflected vision with soft yellow hair waving about a pink and white face and a thick bright plait hanging over her shoulders to her waist. She had ripped the standing collar from her blouse and substituted a round turnover collar and tie that took away the primness, and when she daringly jabbed a little silver pin in the tie, the transformation was complete. As Betty Pogany ran down the stairs she didn’t look, as she had looked yesterday and the day before, an overgrown young woman. She looked what she really was—a big little girl. And if in truth she resembled a baby giant, it was an attractive, perhaps even a charming baby giant.

At the foot of the stair, however, the girl stopped short, dismayed. How should she ever face them—Aunt Sarah and her father? As she had worked busily the evening before, she had been conscious of doing something singular—something venturesome and daring; but she had been too deeply absorbed as well as too eagerly excited to be troubled by definite doubts. And she had fallen asleep the moment she had dropped into bed and awakened with a thrill of expectancy. Only now it came to her coldly that they who dance must pay the piper.

There was no question at all with regard to Aunt Sarah. She would be utterly shocked and scandalized. She would appeal to Betty’s father, and alas! it was only rarely that she appealed in vain. And her father was quite equal to ordering Betty to go straight to her chamber, put up her hair, don a long skirt (she had altered two, but the oldest one she had she hadn’t time to touch) and wear it to church. Betty knew well that her father was secretly mortified because of her size and that he was often the more severe with her on that account.

She stole silently into the parlor and glanced fearfully into the large mirror which she was wont to avoid sedulously. The image that faced her really startled her. She hadn’t thought of anything but making her clothing more conformable to her years and so comfortable as to allow her to gain freedom of movement. She was amazed, confounded—indeed, she felt almost guilty at the singular attractiveness of the result. Even so, Betty Pogany didn’t at all see what another would have seen—she was far prettier than she realized. But what she saw was enough to cause her to turn away hurriedly.

As she paused on the threshold, trying to think of some ingratiating or deprecatory remark to make to Aunt Sarah, on a sudden something quite foreign flashed suddenly into the girl’s mind and she quite forgot herself, her anxiety, her disguise (or her change from long disguising), and even that wonderful sense of freedom. Perhaps the new dressing of her hair suggested it. As she had parted it, Betty had recollected how poor Rose’s hair had looked yesterday, and she had wondered whether she mightn’t, next Saturday, beg Mrs. Harrow to allow her to do Rose’s hair for her in the old becoming fashion. But this was something far bigger and more daring, this suggestion which flashed before her instantaneously, but with a completeness and fulness that quite took her breath away. She felt like shouting, like singing something stirring such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And when she entered the kitchen, hugging the vision to her bosom, she was so engrossed thereby that at first she didn’t understand the horrified stare upon Aunt Sarah’s face.

CHAPTER VI

“GOOD HEAVENS! Betsey Pogany!” cried Aunt Sarah, and then poured forth such a torrent of reproaches as Betty had never heard. The “good heavens!” in itself was a volume. Betty had once been sent to bed supperless for saying it, being told it was the same as swearing. And the blast of scorn and wrath that followed might have been a torrent of good heavenses. But though it was the worst outburst Betty had ever heard, she minded it the least. And this wasn’t at all because of the vision in the mirror. It was because of the other vision—the vision of Rose Harrow—that Betty endured the onslaught almost unscathed. And even when her father came down to breakfast, and Aunt Sarah turned to him to make the expected plea, Betty’s heart didn’t sink as she had believed it must.

“George, will you look at that girl! Will you take just one look at your only daughter, George Pogany!” his sister adjured him dramatically.

George Pogany, a very tall, gaunt, rather hard-featured man, obediently turned his eyes upon his daughter, though he sighed inwardly; for he hated a fuss, especially on Sunday mornings. As he gazed, an expression of wonderment appeared upon his thin, lined face, to be succeeded by a sort of perplexity through which a vague gratification struggled to emerge.

“Bless my heart! Whatever have you been doing, Betty!” he exclaimed kindly. “As I live, you’ve been growing smaller. She doesn’t look near so big and fat, does she, Sarah?”

Miss Pogany could only snort, and he went on unheeding:

“And your hair—I’d forgot you had such pretty hair—and long—my goodness! What have you gone and done all of a sudden, child?”

His sister stared at him in speechless amazement. Betty herself was almost as astonished.

“I just braided it, instead of pugging it up, and tied it with a ribbon,” she said with gentle eagerness. “Do you really like it so, father?”

“I like it amazing,” he said promptly. “You don’t look so grown-up.”

They sat down to the table. Pogany continued to gaze at his daughter. But his brow clouded.

“What I want to know is how you happened to lose flesh so? It looks a heap better, and yet—I wouldn’t have you starve yourself, Betty. Have you been trying any such wicked doings?” he demanded.

Betty laughed almost wildly. Her aunt snorted again. She dropped the coffee pot as if she feared to trust herself with it and clasped her hands.

“George Pogany! Are you clean out of your head?” she demanded. “Can’t you see? Where are your eyes? Fat—why, the girl looks like a barrel. A barrel! Look at her waist! What do you say to the size of it?”

He looked at Betty’s waist. “Yes, it’s a right smart way round it, Sarah,” he acknowledged. “And yet, somehow, Betty don’t look so big—not near. I could have sworn she’d lost pounds, and that sash shows off all the better.”

He looked musingly at the wide, soft silk scarf. Then he looked at Betty’s sweet, flushed face.

“When you were little, Betty, and your mother was living, she used to tie the bow behind. I remember how it hung down as far as some little scallops that edged the bottom of your little white dress,” he remarked, his harsh voice pitched low. “Perhaps you couldn’t reach round to tie it so?”

“O yes, I can, father; I can reach anywhere now! I’ll change it so before church,” the girl declared.

“Church,” echoed Miss Pogany. “Church! Don’t think you’ll be allowed to go to church looking like that, young lady. I’d be ashamed to have you step outside the door, such a fright as you are. I shouldn’t like you to go as far as the hen-coop.”

Betty was as much amazed by her own boldness as she was by her father’s attitude, though later she realized that the former depended upon the latter. She seemed now to be listening to some other girl speaking in cool determined accents.

“O, I’ll change and wear my good skirt, but I have shortened that, too,” she said. “And I’m always going to wear my hair down. It feels so much better, and father likes it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what’s come over you, Betty Pogany!” gasped Aunt Sarah. “It’s perfectly disgraceful! Tell me, George, are you going to allow that impudent girl to go to church with her clothes almost up to her knees and without her corsets?”

Pogany’s face was transfixed with horror.

“Bless my heart! Whatever have you been doing, Betty?”

“Corsets!” he echoed hoarsely. “Do you mean to tell me, Sarah, that my daughter wears corsets—and she only twelve years old! I never heard the like!”

“George Pogany! of course she does. She’s worn them for more than two years now. She has to, of course. Anyone as fat as Betty has to wear corsets,” declared Miss Pogany.

“Not if I know it,” he retorted indignantly. “Betsey, as soon as you have eaten your breakfast you go straight upstairs and take off those corsets, and don’t you ever let me hear of your wearing any such foolish things again until you are eighteen years old. Do you understand?”

“Yes, father,” said Betty, “and like as not you won’t hear of it even when I’m eighteen.”

An hour after breakfast, as George Pogany, dressed in his Sunday clothes, sat stiffly by the window waiting to accompany his sister and daughter to church, Betty stole up behind him, put her arms about his neck, and shyly kissed him.

“You’re so good, father,” she said softly. “I am so happy because you don’t mind my braiding my hair and—not being so grown-up.”

She slipped out shyly. George Pogany’s heart beat quickly. He couldn’t remember that his only child had come to him thus and kissed him since she had been a toddling baby. Something strange seemed to have taken place. Instead of the big, overgrown daughter he had been secretly rather ashamed of, he seemed to have seen this morning the little girl she would naturally have been at her age. And pretty, too, she was, surprisingly pretty—touchingly so, in truth, to George Pogany, though he didn’t realize it. He couldn’t understand it at all, nor why his throat seemed husky. But in any event, the practical hardware merchant came to a practical conclusion. He had already looked ahead to the autumn when Betty would enter the high school at Paulding with her class with two railroad fares a day to be paid; and he had decided that to the weekly total of ninety cents she should contribute the twenty-five cents she had for pin money. Now he said to himself that he would pay her fares and she should have her allowance for hair-ribbons or sweets. And perhaps, being in the high school, she ought to have it increased.

CHAPTER VII

MRS. PHILLIPS rushed into her brother’s room in unwonted excitement. “Humphrey, look quick! Bouncing Bet is going by, and—will you see her! Did you ever see the like of that?”

“I saw her Monday morning, Isabel,” Meadowcroft returned quietly. “And I have noticed her a number of times since. It is certainly a singular change. It’s a genuine transformation.”

“Rather a pity, it seems to me,” Mrs. Phillips rejoined a bit sharply, for she felt he approved. “She was of the real peasant type, with broad shoulders and hips and compressed waist, and might better, in my opinion, have remained true to type. Now she looks like—anyone.”

“Isabel, you are truly absurd, talking about peasant types in America, especially in this country village where your husband grew up and went barefoot after the cows and then milked them,” her brother returned warmly. “There isn’t a child in South Paulding, so far as I know, that isn’t as American as you or I; and I fancy Betty Pogany’s forbears are quite as respectable as ours. And if you’re talking about types, that girl is nearer the Greek marble type than the peasant. I felt something monumental in her, also, when I talked to her, something essentially noble. Well—we shall see.” And Humphrey Meadowcroft sighed.

Mrs. Phillips resented the sigh, or the cause of it. She was fond of her brother and felt assured that if he would only become a genuine member of her household, instead of an alien dwelling under her roof, he would be better occupied than by a quixotic interest in stupid children which made him low-spirited. For herself, she never sighed in that manner—as if it hurt.

“Brother, let me tell you something for your own good. Stick to little Finnemore,” she said lightly. “He’s grubby, but there is something rather taking about the youngster for all that. On the other hand—believe me, it’s a big risk to allow anyone so heavy and ponderous as Bouncing Bet to settle herself on your threshold. You remember the kind-hearted traveler who invited the camel into his tent?”

Meadowcroft smiled vaguely. He scarcely heard what his sister was saying. He was marveling to see Betty Pogany making her rapid way up the street toward the corner beyond which the Harrows lived—it was Saturday, and Tommy had told him that Betty always visited her former schoolmate on the afternoon of her holiday. The girl was fairly striding. She went easily, lightly and even gracefully, too, with all her speed,—he could almost see in her a Greek Victory blown by the wind. It wasn’t that the change was marvelous in itself. It was perfectly simple and natural. The wonder was that it should have come about so quickly—instantaneously, it would seem—and that a shy child like Betty should exhibit no self-consciousness. When she had passed the house on Monday at noon (Meadowcroft had missed her in the morning, for she had gone early with her father that he might get her some sensible shoes) she had been as unconcerned and unself-conscious as if nothing had happened—as if she had always been a picturesque, graceful, rather charming, big little girl.

There was an explanation, however, and a very good one. Had Mr. Meadowcroft known the nature of Betty Pogany’s errand to-day he might have guessed the answer to the riddle immediately. It was that vision of Sunday morning that had flashed upon her and had dwelt with her all through the week. For six days, the girl had trodden on air, buoyed by the consciousness of that secret vision. In her absorption therein, she had so completely forgotten herself that she had fallen, almost unawares, into habitudes which must otherwise only have been acquired slowly and with repeated, perhaps painful effort. Upborne by the vision, stimulated by the adventure of it, Betty had dropped her husk of maturity as easily as a snake sloughs his skin, and, freed from the fetters of constraint and convention, had appeared naturally and almost unconsciously as the girl of twelve she really was. Only when she was reminded by Aunt Sarah’s resentful silence at home or some remark from her schoolmates, or a chance glance in the mirror (she still avoided mirrors by second nature) did Betty remember herself. Otherwise the vision wholly monopolized her.

Tommy had scarcely seen her all the week and had begged her to come in on Saturday afternoon to see him do the wonderful trick with the bottom of a glass bottle. Mr. Meadowcroft’s Herbie had collected over three dozen bottles, and as soon as his father should let him off from his Saturday morning chores Tommy was to begin on them, and he would be ready for her at any time after dinner. Betty decided to go to him first. All eagerness as she was to get away, her rigid training and her unselfishness sustained her. She listened sympathetically to a tale of thirty-odd failures and of Tommy’s trouble with his father because of the amount of broken glass in the woodshed, and watched with her wonted hopeful interest a substitute trick he tried to perform. It wasn’t successful, and she agreed with Tommy that picking up broken glass had spoiled the sensitiveness of his hands for that day. But she gently refused to wait to see him try again, rushed down to the shop on an errand for Aunt Sarah, and, when Mr. Meadowcroft saw her and marveled, was hastening to her real journey’s end.

When Mrs. Harrow opened the door, Betty’s eyes shone so deeply and her cheeks glowed so rosily, that in other circumstances that lady must have wondered. But she hadn’t seen the girl since the preceding Saturday, and there was something far more striking and startling to discover about her than shining eyes and glowing cheeks. She stared at her in utter amazement, her face, which, since Rose’s illness, had taken on a seemingly permanent expression of half-fretful, half-despairing anxiety, becoming void for the nonce of all save sheer wonderment.

“Why, Betty Pogany!” she cried. Then she recollected herself and dropped her voice to the hushed, sepulchral half-whisper which had become habitual with her and which seemed to Betty to-day worse than ever before. “What does this mean—your hair down and a short skirt and—you have left off—— I suppose it is just a Saturday afternoon frolic, but I wonder your aunt let you come out in the street so.”

“O no, it isn’t just for to-day, it’s for always—or until I am really grown-up,” Betty returned in her clear, sweet voice, which she did not lower though Mrs. Harrow’s finger flew quickly to her lips in warning. “I’m going to wear my hair in a tail and my skirts like this till I’m seventeen or eighteen; and father’s forbidden me to wear corsets.”

Mrs. Harrow looked at the girl as if she believed she was out of her head and was wondering whether she was dangerous.

“How is Rose?” Betty asked eagerly.

“About the same,” whispered Mrs. Harrow lugubriously. “Don’t say anything to her, Betty about—your clothes, you know, and your hair. You won’t, will you?”

“But, Mrs. Harrow, why not? What’s the harm?” the girl asked eagerly. And Mrs. Harrow stared harder than before.

“Why, Betty Pogany! to think of your asking that! I have always thought I could trust you just like an older person,” Mrs. Harrow whispered reproachfully, her eyes round and shocked. “You ought to know yourself that it would make Rose feel terribly, for you know how I try to keep her from thinking of old times.”

“But, Mrs. Harrow, what can she think of?” the girl asked warmly. “She’s got to think of something, Rose has, and there isn’t anything but old times, is there, unless you let me talk about things going on now?”

“She can think about the book I’m reading to her,” declared Rose’s mother severely. “It is sweet and soothing and—I think, Betty, you had just better go right on with it to-day instead of talking or singing. If you talk—your voice is different and I am sure it would excite her. And if you come to anything in the book that you think would excite her, just leave it out. But be very careful about it. Don’t stop or let her dream that you’re skipping anything. Rosy’s so nervous that——”

“Mama!” called Rose fretfully from the room beyond the passage, “why doesn’t Betty come in?”

“Poor darling, she’s very suspicious lately,” whispered Mrs. Harrow, and hurried Betty in.

“Betty had to stop in the entry a minute to—to fix something,” she explained nervously. “She came as soon as—it was all right, Rosy darling. I suppose it did seem long.”

“But, mama, what were you saying all that time?” demanded the hollow-eyed girl querulously. “I heard you whispering and whispering and whispering.”

Mrs. Harrow glanced at Betty in dismay, but she answered hurriedly.

“O, I wasn’t whispering, Rosy, but I suppose my voice was husky because of reading so long, and we were only talking about how people don’t half sew braid on skirts nowadays,” she said glibly, the while Betty’s eyes grew round with an amazement that was almost horror. “You know, darling, Betty being such a great girl and wearing long dresses has to have braid on the bottom of her skirt just as ladies do.”

Deeply shocked by such duplicity in one whom she had always respected, Betty dropped weakly into a chair. But her spirit did not fail her. And when Mrs. Harrow began to point at the open book, puckering her lips and grimacing grotesquely, though the girl knew what she meant, she wouldn’t respond. Mrs. Harrow, however, was equal to the occasion.

“What’s that, Betty?” she asked, affably rhetorical. “O—that book? I’m reading it to Rosy and it is very sweet, indeed. I want just to run out and do my marketing before Mr. Harrow gets back, and if you want to go on with the book while I’m gone, I sha’n’t feel rushed. Page 63 is where I stopped. See, right there. You might just read that sentence over to get a good start.”

Betty took the book and read the sentence in docile fashion. She went on quietly and Mrs. Harrow, after standing on the threshold a few moments, left the room. Betty read steadily until she heard the gate slam to. Then she stopped in the midst of a sentence.

CHAPTER VIII

“ROSE, I’ve got something to tell you!” cried Betty eagerly. “It’s something splendid, but I can’t do it here. Come out and take a walk, won’t you? You see I want to be sure to get it all over without your mother’s hearing. You can tell her afterwards.”

Rose’s eyes filled with tears.

“O, Betty, I couldn’t,” she protested, her voice dropping its listlessness. “I haven’t been out since—you know, except when papa takes me in the buggy.”

“Well, what of that?” demanded Betty. “All the more fun, if it’s the first time. It’s lovely to-day. Everything looks and smells so sweet. We won’t go far.”

“O, but I couldn’t! People would—see me!” cried Rose shrinkingly.

“Well, let ’em. Rose. And anyhow, they’d just love to, everybody would. And why shouldn’t they? You look just the same as you always did except that you’re awfully pale and your hair isn’t done so prettily. People that didn’t know would never dream you couldn’t see. Listen! wouldn’t it be fun to go along as if nothing had happened and when I see anyone coming I’ll tell you and you can say ‘hullo’ like you always did?”

Rose Harrow sat erect in her chair, clasping her hands almost wildly.

“Betty, is that true? Do you mean that, or are you just saying it like mama says things, because you pity me?” she demanded. “Do I look the same? You don’t mean—you can’t mean that my eyes look—all right?”

“I do mean it,” asseverated Betty.

“Honest and true?” demanded Rose. Betty’s reputation for truthfulness was established, but Mrs. Harrow’s conduct indicated that another sort of ethics prevailed with the blind. Moreover this statement was too wonderful to be conceivable.

“Cross my heart and hope to die, they look exactly the same,” Betty declared solemnly. “Your eyes haven’t changed the least mite except that they look a little darker and sort of sober instead of sparkling. Tommy could hardly believe it, nor father, but it’s true. If you wouldn’t hang your head and would turn towards people when they spoke, why, nobody——”

Betty stopped, appalled. For Rose was sobbing wildly.

“Rose! darling Rose!” she cried, running to her and throwing her arms about her.

“O, Betty, why didn’t you say so before? Why didn’t somebody tell me?” the girl wailed. “I have suffered so. And everyone sounded as if—— O, I thought I looked frightful, so that——”

On a sudden she raised her head. As she smiled through her tears, Rose was almost her old self. She dried her eyes quickly.

“Sure, Betty, I’d love to go to walk!” she declared happily. “We’ll go as soon as mama gets home to put on my shoes and get my hat, and——”

“We can do that ourselves,” suggested Betty. “I know where your shoes are.” And she fetched them from a clothespress.

Rose shook off one slipper and held out her foot.

“Why don’t you try putting them on?” suggested Betty diplomatically.

“But I shouldn’t know which was which,” Rose faltered rather pitifully.

“Try one, and if that isn’t right, then the other,” Betty advised. “There’s only two chances, you know. It isn’t like you were a centipede.” And she put one shoe into Rose’s hand and the other on the floor. Rose had them on her feet and tied in a twinkling, but the curious sense of satisfaction following the simple act lingered.

“Now we’ll go up to your room and do your hair like you used to wear it.” Betty went on in a manner she strove hard to make matter-of-fact, though secretly she was wildly excited. “I’ll part it for you if you don’t get it straight. Do you know who you look just like now with it so slick and prim? Little Huldy Christiansen!”

Rose laughed out—for the first time since Christmas. She rose. Her face eager, her eyes sparkling, she stood perfectly still holding out her hand, ready to be guided. But Betty had not been thinking and planning for naught all through that week.

“Rose, don’t you remember how when I used to stay all night with you, you would come downstairs in the pitch-dark to get apples and things to eat in bed?” she asked. “I couldn’t come, too, you know, because I was so big the stairs would have creaked.”

“Sure I remember,” said Rose, and laughed again. But she did not make the application expected.

“You didn’t need anyone to lead you then,” Betty reminded her. “Why can’t you find your way to your own room just as well now as you could then?”

Rose’s face lighted up.

“Of course!” she cried. “I never thought. Perhaps I can.” And suddenly she started boldly.

She encountered the center table with some force, but laughed gaily. That gave her the direction and she went thence unerringly into the passage, caught the balustrade, and ran excitedly up the stair and into her own chamber. When Betty reached the room, Rose sat on the bed, half-laughing, half-crying.

“Come,” said Betty, who paused at the dresser. “We must get your hair done and your dress changed.” Rose slipped out of her dressing-gown, followed Betty’s voice to the dresser and released her long, abundant dark brown hair from the tight plait. When she had brushed it out, she tried parting it, and when the parting was pronounced straight, both girls laughed as if it were a game. And when it was braided and tied, there was so much of the old color in Rose’s cheeks that Betty cried out.

“O, Rose, you look so pretty and so natural!” she exclaimed, kissing her. “You look just like old times.”

Rose drew a long, sobbing breath.

“What dress do you want?” Betty asked quickly.

“My blue skirt and middy!” cried Rose eagerly.

“Help yourself!” said Betty in a funny voice, and they laughed again.

Rose found the skirt in the clothespress and the blouse in a drawer of the chest. When she was dressed, Betty declared the transformation was complete. Rose was feeling in the top drawer of the dresser for a scarlet tie when the girls were startled by an agonized wail from below.

“Rose! Rose! Rosy darling!” cried Mrs. Harrow beseechingly; and before the startled girls could find voice, “Betty Pogany! what has happened? Where is Rose?”

“Hoo-hoo! here we are, mama, up here in my chamber!” Rose sang out in a gay voice Mrs. Harrow had not heard in six months and never expected to hear again. Flying upstairs, she stood on the threshold of the chamber white and breathless.

She stared at that familiar, beloved figure standing adjusting a tie before the mirror as if she believed she was in a dream—her expression made it a nightmare. Then she turned questioningly to Betty. She couldn’t speak; but she looked as one might who has entrusted an infant to another and found him standing it on its feet and urging it to walk.

“Betty’s going to take me out for a little walk, mama,” said Rose demurely. She looked so sparkling and lively, so like the girl she had been before that terrible illness, that her mother felt as if her heart were breaking.

“My darling, I couldn’t let you do that,” she gasped. “And O, Rosy, do sit down.”

Going to the girl, she forced her gently into a padded rocker she had placed in her chamber since her illness.

“You’re not strong enough to walk,” she added, “and, O, something might happen! I should worry every second. Your papa’ll be here very soon now, and if you’ll both promise to be very quiet, I’ll get him to take Betty along, too.”

“But Betty doesn’t want to ride, and neither do I,” Rose rejoined. “I’m dead sick of it, so there!”

“It might help Rose to get stronger to walk a little, Mrs. Harrow,” Betty urged very gently. “We wouldn’t go but just a teeny way, and I’d be awfully careful. And what can happen now any more than when Rose used to be out with the girls?”

Mrs. Harrow almost glared at the girl. The poor woman was nearly distraught.

“It’s very different,” she retorted. “I should be frightened to death and Rose sha’n’t go one step. And I don’t know what you mean, anyhow, Betty Pogany, coming here looking like an overgrown Tomboy and putting crazy notions into Rosy’s head. I wish I hadn’t let you in. Something seemed to warn me not to. But I thought a great girl like you, a woman grown, might be trusted.”

Rose was leaning forward on the padded arm of the chair.

“What does she mean by your looking like a Tomboy, Betty?” she asked wonderingly.

Betty glanced deprecatingly at Mrs. Harrow.

“I have got on a short skirt and low-heeled shoes and don’t wear corsets any more,” she said in a low voice. “And I’ve got my hair down my back, too.”

Rose reached out and skilfully caught the thick bright braid and gave it a playful yank.

“O, Betty, I wish I——” she began, but stopped herself. She looked towards her mother.

“There’s no use in picking on Betty, mama,” she remarked. “I am going to walk. I haven’t been out of the house for six months except to be lifted into that old buggy like a sack of meal and to ride behind that pokey old horse. And I’m sick to death of sitting in the house from morning till night hearing reading, reading, reading, with all the parts I’d care anything about skipped. And I’m tired of being pitied. And you never told me that—that I don’t look hideous nor even blind, and——”