s set irregularly back from fences
of varying patterns, and the brick sidewalks were raised and broken in
places by the roots of huge sycamores and maples along the curbs.

But the cropped head of Alexina turned this way and that in vain. The
street was deserted, the stillness lonesome. She swallowed hard. She
knew where the little girl named Emily Carringford lived, for she had
pointed out the house that first evening as they ran past in play, so
Alexina slowly crossed the street, hoping Emily might be at her gate.

But first, as she went along, came a wide brick cottage, sitting high
above a basement, a porch across the front. She gazed in between the
pickets of the fence, for it seemed nice in there. The ground was
mossy under the trees, and the untrimmed bushes made bowers with their
branches. She would like to play in this yard. Her eyes travelled on
to the house. A gentleman sat in a cane arm-chair at the foot of the
steps, smoking, and on the porch was a lady in a white dress with
ribbons. The house looked old and the yard looked old, and so did the
gentleman, but the lady was young; maybe she was going to a party, for
it was a gauzy dress and the ribbons were rosy.

Alexina liked the cottage and the lady, and the big, wide yard, and
somehow did not feel as lonesome as she had. She started on to find
Emily, but at that moment the gate of the cottage swung out across her
path. How could she know that the boy upon it, lonely, too, had
planned the thing from the moment of her starting up the street?

"Oh," said Alexina, and stopped, and looked at the boy, uncomfortably
immaculate in fresh white linen clothes, but he was absorbed in the
flight of a bird across the rosy western sky.

"Come and play," said the straightforward Alexina. Companionship was
what she was in search of.

The boy, without looking at her, shook his head, not so much as if he
meant no, but as if he did not know how to say yes.

Perhaps she divined this, for approaching the gate and fingering its
hasp, she asked,

"Why?"

The boy, assuming a sort of passivity of countenance as for cover to
shyness, kicked at the gate, then scowled as he twisted his neck
within the stiff circle of his round collar with the combative air of
one who wars against starch. "There's nobody to play with," he said;
"they've all gone to the Sunday-school picnic. I don't go to that
church," nodding in the direction of a brick structure down the
street.

"You go