ven to seeing jokes on all occasions, under all circumstances. Go
wherever you might, from a prayer-meeting to the playground, you were
sure to hear her little giggle.

"A letter for you," repeated Delia Guest. "He, he!"

Miss Cardrew laid down her arithmetic, opened the letter, and read it.
"Gypsy Breynton."

[Illustration]

The arithmetic class stopped whispering, and there was a great lull in
the schoolroom.

"Why I never!" giggled Delia. Gypsy, all in a flutter at having her name
read right out in school, and divided between her horror lest the kitten
she had tied to a spool of thread at recess, had been discovered, and an
awful suspicion that Mr. Jonathan Jones saw her run across his plowed
field after chestnuts, went slowly up to the desk.

"Your mother has sent for you to come directly home," said Miss Cardrew,
in a low tone. Gypsy looked a little frightened.

"Go home! Is anybody sick, Miss Cardrew?"

"She doesn't say--she gives no reasons. You'd better not stop to talk,
Gypsy."

Gypsy went to her desk, and began to gather up her books as fast as she
could.

"I shouldn't wonder a bit if the house'd caught afire," whispered Agnes
Gaylord. "I had an uncle once, and his house caught afire--in the
chimney too, and everybody'd gone to a prayer-meeting; they had now,
true's you live."

"Maybe your father's dead," condoled Sarah Rowe.

"Or Winnie."

"Or Tom."

"Just think of it!"

"What _do_ you s'pose it is?"

"If I were you, I guess I'd be frightened!"

"Order!" said Miss Cardrew, in a loud voice.

The girls stopped whispering, and Gypsy, in nowise reassured by their
sympathy, hurried out to put on her things. With her hat thrown on one
side of her head, the strings hanging down into her eyes, her sack
rolled up in a bundle under her arm, and her rubbers in her pocket, she
started for home on the full run. Yorkbury was pretty well used to
Gypsy, but everybody stopped and stared at her that morning; what with
her burning cheeks, and those rubbers sticking out of her pocket, and
the hat-strings flying, and the brambles catching her dress, and the mud
splashing up under her swift feet, it was no wonder.

"Miss Gypsy!" called old Mr. Simms, the clerk, as she flew by the door
of her father's book-store. "Miss Gypsy, my _dear_!"

But on ran Gypsy without so much as giving him a look, across the road
in front of a carriage, around a load of hay, and away like a bird down
the street. Out ran Gypsy