hed it from Dan to Beersheba. She's only a child, but this
thing will stick to her as long as she lives."

Her mother sobbed. "Our poor Roxy! Tom, if the school children get hold
of it, she will never go another day. The child is so sensitive! I don't
know how to punish her as I ought. I can only think how to save her
from what is before her."

O, how Roxy, standing at the key-hole, trembled to see her mother lean
her head on her father's shoulder and sob, and to see tears on her
father's cheeks! O, what a wicked, wicked girl! It _was_ thieving; in
some way it was even worse than that; as if she had committed a--a
forgery, maybe, Roxy thought. She was conscious she had done something
unusually daring and dreadful.

She stole off up stairs, shut herself in, and cried as hard as she could
cry. Afterward her little brain began to busy itself in many directions.
She tried to fancy herself shamed and pointed at, afraid to go to
school, afraid to go down to the store, ashamed to go to the table, with
no right to laugh, and play, and stay around near her mother, never
again to dare ask her father to ride when he was going off with the
horses.

So lonely and gloomy, she tried to think what it was possible to do. At
last, as in the morning, a daring thought occurred to her suddenly. She
made up her mind in just one minute to do it.

When her mother called, she went down to supper at once. The boys were
gone. Nobody but she and father and mother; and the three had very red
eyes, and said nothing, but passed things to each other in a kind,
quiet way, that seemed to Roxy like folks after a funeral--perhaps it
did to the rest of them. Roxy was fanciful enough to think to herself,
"Yes, it is _my_ funeral. We have just buried my good name."

Silently, one with a white face, the other with a red one, Roxy and her
mother did up the work. Then Roxy went up to her room again. She took a
sheet of foolscap, and made it into four sheets of note paper. She wrote
and printed something on each sheet, and folded all the sheets into
letters. Then she went down stairs. Two of the little letters she handed
to her mother. Then, bonnet in hand, she stole out the front door. At
the gate she looked down the road toward the village, up the road toward
Mr. Markham's. She started toward Mr. Markham's. She got over the road
marvelously; for the child was wild to get the thing over with. She was
going up the path to the house when she saw Mr. Markham