sacred
to her in her progress. Her short shirt of a plaid gingham flopped above
her thin, bony legs as she ran, and she grasped a wide-brimmed straw hat
in one hand.

* * * * *

It should be said that this girl appalled the twins hardly less than
would an avenging apparition of the outraged Jonas Whipple. Beings of a
baser extraction, they had looked upon Whipples only from afar and with
awe. Upon this particular 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 b